Bruce Boxleitner knows exactly what he wants out of life. 'I want recognition. Fame. My whole dream all my life was to come to Hollywood, work in TV, movies, do anything. You just have to be alive to destiny.' Boxleitner, 34, 6ft 2in tall, green-eyed, with a permanent tan he gets from riding his horses over his land in Hidden Hills, California, wants to be an old-time hero, a matinee idol.

His hero is John Wayne — there's a 3ft bronze statue of him in Boxleitner's western-style ranch house. He's watched all of Errol Flynn's films (his all-time favorite is The Adventures of Robin Hood, 1938) and he wouldn't mind a Clark Gable romantic part now and then. Right now, he's relishing his leading role in Scarecrow and Mrs. King, with Kate Jackson. The two of them have a teasing, lighthearted sexual chemistry on screen and off, and both are working non-stop to keep the series successful.

Boxleitner, who is being guided in his career by Hollywood 'starmaker' agent Jay Bernstein, still hasn't fully recovered from the failure of his recent series Bring 'Em Back Alive, in which he played dashing big game hunter Frank Buck. 'I was really blue about that,' he says. 'But you have to keep going.'

It's not in Boxleitner's bushy-tailed character to be depressed for long. He is happily married to actress Kathryn Holcomb (he calls her Kitty), who has temporarily given up her career to bring up their son Sam, three. The couple met when they played brother and sister in the TV mini-series How the West Was Won (1963), in which Boxleitner rode on air for a few weeks acting with John Wayne.

'All his life,' says Kitty, 'he's wanted to play good guys. He suffered through the decade of the anti-hero. This is a good time for us. I'm aware of the pitfalls fame can cause but it's something we want. It represents success. We're going for it.'

Boxleitner agrees. His roles over the past couple of years have included the leading part in Disney's space-age Tron (1982) and a co-starring role with country singer Kenny Rogers in his TV movie Kenny Rogers as the Gambler (1980).

A small-town boy from Illinois, Bruce Boxleitner is living his dream. He grins as he's called back on set to leap in and out of a helicopter all afternoon. 'The substance of success is to keep going . . . you've just got to keep ahead of the game.'

Kate Jackson, a scratchy-voiced, energetic and tough perfectionist, rules the roost in her new series Scarecrow and Mrs. King. The show has brought her back into the TV limelight five years after leaving Charlie's Angels — or was told to leave, depending on whose version you believe — and she has no intention whatsoever of letting Scarecrow get ragged at the edges.

The past few years have been chequered for Kate, 35; she was the bright-eyed, brainy one of the glamorous, crime-solving, thigh-flashing Angels — the other two originals were Farrah Fawcett and Jaclyn Smith. Kate's success proved to be as short-lived as her whirlwind marriage to actor Andrew Stevens, six years her junior. A TV movie they made together flopped, as did Kate's three subsequent films Thunder and Lightning (1977), with David Carradine, Dirty Tricks (1980), and Making Love (1982).

She and Stevens divorced after two years. Under California law she had to share communal property. 'I felt as if my husband drove up to my bank account with a Brinks truck. He didn't take me for everything but it was bye-bye to a few zeros.'

A year later, Alabama-born Kate was ready to try marriage again. On 1 May 1982, shortly after she met New York businessman David Greenwald, also six years her junior, they married. It was an informal affair — an early morning ceremony by a swimming pool owned by a Beverly Hills judge. 'I was down when I met David. I was dragging through life out here and we began talking on the phone, him in New York, me in LA — two or three hours a night for weeks. Distance can be a good thing.'

The signs, however, are that the relationship is now back on a long-distance basis. Greenwald, who moved his business to Los Angeles and then became president of Kate's production company, is now spending most of his time in New York.

In the meantime, Kate Jackson is living with her two dogs in her beautiful Beverly Hills home. Every night a maid sets out her meagre dinner and plate full of vitamin pills, just as she did when Kate was working all hours on Charlie's Angels. There is no time for anything else in her life, but that's the way she wants it. 'I need to get up early every day, I need a schedule, I need to work hard,' she says. 'I don't want to live a life in which my biggest daily decision is where to eat lunch.'

By Lesley Salisbury