Tom Selleck warned he’d lose TV job if he ever shaved off famous moustache

Movie star Tom Selleck was told to keep his moustache or face losing a TV job.

The 79-year-old, best known for playing private investigator Thomas Magnum in Magnum P.I – which ran from 1980 to 1988 – said he was thinking of getting rid of his tache in 2010. Speaking today (May 4), the actor said he ended up keeping his mouser after being that told bosses at CBS “insisted” he keep it if he was going to play NYC police commissioner Frank Reagan in Blue Bloods.

Asked about his famous “hair furniture”, the Three Men and a Baby star admitted he was thinking of shaving it off to play the role in the cop show, which started in 2010. He said he “planned on doing it clean-shaven” – but that after telling creator of the show Leonard Goldberg about his plans to whip out a razor, he was quickly told to “hold off”.

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Tom, who played Monica’s boyfriend Dr Richard Burke in Friends, said: “Leonard Goldberg, the creator, told me that he freaked out inside (when I told him I was planning shaving off my moustache). He was like ‘Oh, that’s interesting, let me check with the network.’

“Then (Leonard said) ‘Tom, the network is insisting,'” he told the Daily Telegraph magazine. Tom, who has a fortune of around £40m, also said that he, wasn’t born with his moustache, adding: “I was born without it. It’s not as important to me as it seems to be to people.

“And every month or so, it’s completely new. The hairs have grown out, they’ve been trimmed.

“So I don’t know, it’s something I live with. I don’t resent it, but there’s more to the work than a moustache.”

Tom has had a stellar career and has played bachelor architect Peter Mitchell in Three Men and a Baby in 1987 and its sequel Three Men and a Little Lady in 1990. In addition to this, he has also appeared in more than 50 other film and television roles since Magnum, P.I., including the films Quigley Down Under, Mr. Baseball, and Lassiter, to name a few.

The actor, who has one adopted child from his previous marriage and a daughter from his second marriage to Jillie Joan Mack, live with his family near Thousand Oaks-Westlake Village, California, on a 60-acre avocado ranch. The property was previously owned by Dean Martin.

Talkning about ranch life, he previously said: “So I like to get outside and work on the ranch, from fixing roads to clearing brush. I hate going to the gym, so sweating outdoors sure beats sitting on a stationary bike staring at my navel. And I work cheaper than anyone I could hire to do it.”

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