Jack Wagner Biography

Born in Washington, Missouri, the son of Peter Wagner, a car salesman who died in 1990, and his wife, Scotty, he took up golf at age 10 and spent his teen years planning on becoming a pro. Performing on stage was just an extracurricular activity for him at the local St. Gertrude School though he won raves. "He has always been an entertainer, " says his friend Jim Powers, a former teacher at St. Gertrude who is now his personal manager. "He was really a leader of the school." After attending the University of Missouri for a year and winning the state golf championship he applied for a golf scholarship to the University of Arizona in 1980. "Fifty young guys all thought they were going to be Jack Nicklaus," he says. He lost out. In frustration, he auditioned for the drama program and won a full scholarship. From that point on, golf took second place. "I decided that I have much more control over what I do on stage, " says Jack, "than whether or not my golf ball goes out-of-bounds when it hits a tree." The day after graduating in 1982, Wagner drove to Los Angeles, where he found work as a tour guide at Universal Studios while auditioning for parts. After a brief stint in the short lived cable-TV soap "A New Day in Eden", he won the role of Frisco Jones on "General Hospital" (1963).