The Only ‘Magnum, P.I.’ Cast Members Still Alive Today

If you close your eyes, you can probably still hear it: the theme kicking in as a red Ferrari 308 GTS tears along an Oahu coast road, with a mustached private eye in a Detroit Tigers cap behind the wheel. Magnum, P.I. premiered on CBS on December 11, 1980, and for eight seasons Thomas Magnum lived rent-free in the guest house at Robin’s Nest, the beachfront estate of a famous author nobody ever saw. In exchange, he “handled security,” which mostly meant borrowing the car and driving Higgins up the wall.

The show worked because of the family around Magnum. There was the stuffy majordomo with his two Dobermans, the helicopter pilot who kept flying him out of trouble, and the club manager who knew everybody on the island. They kept us coming back until the two-part “Resolutions” closed the series on May 1, 1988, with Rick’s wedding, Magnum reunited with his daughter, and a wink that Higgins might have been Robin Masters all along. Thirty-eight years later, only two stars from that inner circle are still with us. Here is where everyone went, starting with the voice we never saw.

Is Orson Welles still alive?

Robin Masters was the richest man in the show and never once appeared on screen. When he called Robin’s Nest by phone or intercom, the voice on the line belonged to Orson Welles, the man who had made Citizen Kane four decades earlier. Fan records count only a handful of episodes, and he went uncredited in most of them, but that deep, amused voice gave the unseen novelist a real presence.

Welles died on October 10, 1985, in Los Angeles, of an apparent heart attack, as The New York Times reported the next day. He was 70. Only hours before, he had taped his last public appearance, on The Merv Griffin Show. His death left the writers with a mystery they decided to enjoy, and from then on the show kept dropping hints that Higgins himself might be Robin Masters.

Is Gillian Dobb still alive?

Higgins needed someone who could match him cup for cup at teatime, and Gillian Dobb gave him Lady Agatha Chumley. The proper English widow arrived in the season 3 episode “Black on White” and kept turning up through season 8, plainly sweet on Higgins, who was too polite or too proud to notice. Dobb, who was born in London, had already worked in Hawaii on Hawaii Five-O, one of the many island productions that leaned on local talent.

She did not have a long Hollywood career, and her death got little notice at the time. According to IMDb, she was born in Wandsworth in 1929 and died on March 31, 2001, at the age of 71. No cause was made public. Agatha’s teatime visits stayed some of the gentlest scenes in the show, and the next friend on our list got some of the strangest.

Is Jeff MacKay still alive?

Jeff MacKay played Lieutenant “Mac” McReynolds, the doughnut-loving Navy intelligence officer who helped Magnum bend the rules. The show killed Mac with a car bomb in season 3, but it couldn’t quite let him go. MacKay came back as Mac’s ghost and later as Jim Bonnick, a con man who happened to be his exact double, and in at least one episode he played both. He was even in the pilot, as a gate guard named Ski.

MacKay had served with Larry Manetti before, on Baa Baa Black Sheep, and he later reunited with John Hillerman on Berlin Break in 1993. Younger viewers knew him as Master Chief “Big Bud” Roberts Sr. on JAG. He died of liver failure on August 22, 2008, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Variety reported. His documented birthdate of October 20, 1948, made him 59. That same year Hawaii lost the man who played Magnum’s favorite police lieutenant.

Is Kwan Hi Lim still alive?

Lieutenant Yoshi Tanaka of the Honolulu police was rumpled and dry and never quite as sleepy as he looked, and like Magnum he was a Tigers fan. Kwan Hi Lim played him from season 2 on and even brought Tanaka to Murder, She Wrote for the 1986 crossover “Magnum on Ice.” Acting was his side job. The Maui native had practiced law since 1953, and he got his first TV role in his 40s when a Hawaii Five-O casting director spotted him on the beach after a morning of surfing.

On Five-O he mostly played villains, which made the friendly lieutenant a nice change. After Magnum he acted now and then and served as a per diem judge in Honolulu’s Family Court. Lim died in Honolulu on December 22, 2008, at 86, according to Wikipedia and IMDb, and no cause was released. Magnum’s other regular foil in uniform was far less friendly.

Is Lance LeGault still alive?

Colonel “Buck” Greene was the Marine officer who treated Magnum like a pebble in his boot, and Lance LeGault played him with a gravel voice that could stop a jeep. He ran through seasons 2 to 8, and Maggie Poole, Mac’s successor at Naval Intelligence, never could stand him either. At the same time LeGault was chasing Hannibal Smith as Colonel Decker on The A-Team, so for a few years he was TV’s favorite angry colonel on two networks.

His road to Hawaii started with Elvis Presley. LeGault was Presley’s stunt double in Girls! Girls! Girls! and sat beside him with a tambourine in the 1968 comeback special. He died at his Los Angeles home on September 10, 2012. Records disagree on his birth year. Wikipedia puts it at 1937, which would make him 75, while StarTrek.com and IMDb give 77. No cause was widely reported. The man Magnum battled most often lived inside the estate’s main house.

Is John Hillerman still alive?

Jonathan Quayle Higgins III, former sergeant major of the British Army, was played by a man from Denison, Texas. John Hillerman learned the clipped accent by listening to a recording of Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, and it was so convincing that people abroad never guessed. Tom Selleck later recalled for The Hollywood Reporter that London cab drivers would ask him where the British actor on his show came from, and he would tell them Denison, Texas.

Before Magnum, Hillerman was a busy character actor in Paper Moon, Blazing Saddles and Chinatown. Higgins won him a Golden Globe in 1981 and an Emmy in 1987. He retired in 1999 and moved home to Texas, and he died at his Houston home on November 9, 2017, at 84, his nephew Chris Tritico told reporters, as CBS News reported. His cause of death was cardiovascular disease. We marked his passing in our tribute to the man behind Higgins. Five years later, the show lost its pilot.

Is Roger E. Mosley still alive?

Theodore “T.C.” Calvin ran Island Hoppers, a helicopter tour business that somehow spent most of its flying time hauling Magnum out of jams. Roger E. Mosley had known Selleck since the 1973 film Terminal Island, and he brought real convictions to the part. He didn’t smoke, drink or use drugs, and he insisted T.C. didn’t either. He also earned his private helicopter license, though the show never let him fly his own stunts.

Away from Magnum, Mosley starred as the blues singer in Leadbelly in 1976, which he called his favorite role. Later he coached track and appeared in Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper. He came out of retirement in 2019 to play Booky, T.C.’s barber, on the Magnum reboot. On August 4, 2022, a car crash in Lynwood, California, left him paralyzed from the shoulders down. He died three days later, on August 7, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He was 83. His daughter Ch-a wrote that he was “surrounded by family as he transcended peacefully,” and Selleck told ET, “Lotta miles with my friend Roger. Some pretty good ones too. Rest in peace, my friend.” Read more in our story on his death. The man who shared a trailer with him for all those years is still here.

Is Larry Manetti still alive?

Yes. Larry Manetti, who played Orville “Rick” Wright, the smooth manager of the King Kamehameha Club who had friends in low places, was born in Chicago on July 23, 1947, and is 79. He had flown with MacKay on Baa Baa Black Sheep before Magnum, and he stayed with the show for all eight seasons. He later wrote about those years in his 1999 memoir Aloha Magnum.

Hawaii kept calling him back. He played lounge singer Nicky “The Kid” DeMarco on the Hawaii Five-0 reboot from 2013 to 2016 and brought the character to the new Magnum P.I. in 2019. In 2023 he reunited with Selleck on Blue Bloods as retired sergeant Sam Velucci. “Selleck and I had dinner every night with my wife, Nancy, at his favorite restaurant for, I think, six or seven nights,” he told PopCulture.com, as we reported at the time. He and Nancy have been married since 1980. Mosley’s death hit him hard. “Roger and I were very close and we shared a motor home together for eight and a half years,” he told PopCulture.com. “It was a great loss, a great sorrow, and one of the few times in my life that I shed tears when he passed.” SlashFilm, in a piece updated in October, called him the only surviving member of Magnum’s tight circle of friends. That leaves the man in the Ferrari.

Is Tom Selleck still alive?

Yes. Tom Selleck was born in Detroit on January 29, 1945, and he is 81. Magnum very nearly cost him his biggest movie break, because CBS wouldn’t release him to play Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He won the Emmy for the role in 1984 anyway and went on to Three Men and a Baby, Quigley Down Under, a run as Monica’s boyfriend Richard on Friends, nine Jesse Stone films, and 14 seasons as Commissioner Frank Reagan on Blue Bloods, which ended on December 13, 2024. His 2024 memoir You Never Know looks back at how much of it was luck, from losing twice on The Dating Game to the pilots that never sold. “I didn’t plan any of this,” he told ABC7.

He isn’t done. In August, TV Insider reported that he signed on as a guest star in an Apple TV comedy led by Elizabeth Banks, which reunites him with his Three Men and a Baby co-star Ted Danson. The History Channel also announced this year that he will host and narrate a true crime series, Crime and Justice With Tom Selleck, according to TheWrap. Most days he is home on the Ventura County ranch that once belonged to Dean Martin, the 63 acres he once feared losing after Blue Bloods. “He knew he needed to buy back his anonymity, to replenish the soul,” his wife Jillie Mack told AARP The Magazine in 2015. Thomas Magnum spent eight years living on a rich man’s estate and borrowing his Ferrari. The man who played him finally got a place of his own, and he is still out there tending the trees.