Tom Selleck "wasn't taken seriously" early on in his career

He told The Telegraph: "Everybody has a cross to bear as an actor, and everybody has a task to be taken seriously. In the age I was going into acting, Dustin Hoffman didn't have as tough a time getting to be taken seriously. I'm sure he did for years, but my first acting coach said, 'Look, you walk through the door, you're 6ft 4in, you're pretty good-looking, Tom, you have to deliver that'

"And that was a struggle - in that era it was probably harder to be taken seriously [looking like him] than in the 1950s. Unless you delivered. I think a lot of the time I walked in the door and they didn't take me seriously."

But the Emmy Award-winning star- who has been married to Jillie Mack since 1987 and has 35-year-old daughter Hannah with her - noted that he has "never been totally comfortable" with the idea that a lack of privacy automatically comes with being famous as he noted that his first wife Jacqueln Ray got the "rough end" of things when he first became well-known.

He said: "I have never been totally comfortable with the expression "it goes with the territory" - people who say that have probably never been in the territory. But I had to find a way to keep at least some part of me private. Jacki got the rough end of it.

"They said I left her because of Magnum, well we split up about a year before the pilot, so all those things were a little bruising."