John Corbett's road from steel plant worker to Bo Derek's leading man
02.08.2023 - 10:45
/ foxnews.com
John Corbett won over audiences playing Aidan Shaw, the down-to-earth boyfriend of Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw on "Sex and the City," and fans were ecstatic when he returned for the second season of "And Just Like That…" Before he became an actor, Corbett grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia, with his mother and stepfather. While there, he got his first taste of the entertainment world helping out at his uncle’s club, where he first became interested in guitar. He watched country greats like Buck Owens and Waylon Jennings perform, and eventually his mom bought him his first guitar.
"My mom bought me a pawn shop cheapy guitar, you know, the kind with the strings six inches off of the fretboard, and Bob [his friend] would teach me some chords. I guess I was about 7 or 8 when I learned to play chords," he told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal in 2011. ‘A class clown’ Corbett didn’t stay focused on a music career and later moved to Southern California to be with his father, working in a steel plant.
"I wanted to believe there was something else out there for me, something I was meant to do. But I had no idea what it was," he said in an essay in Guideposts in 2017. "Then, one day some pipes came off the assembly line and hit me in the back.
Next thing I knew, I was on disability, walking with a cane, popping painkillers." After the injury, he enrolled in community college at his father's suggestion. It's where he met some friends who invited him to an improv class. "I’ve always been a guy that made my friends laugh, a class clown," Corbett told The New York Times last month.