Alex McArthur

Alex McArthur played roles in a host of made-for-television movies in the 1980s and 1990s, in addition to appearing in numerous films and television series. His most prominent film appearance is as Detective Davey Sikes in the 1997 Morgan Freeman-Ashley Judd thriller, "Kiss the Girls." At the beginning of his career, small roles on TV series such as "Scarecrow and Mrs. King" and "Hill Street Blues" led to a five-episode stint on nighttime soap "Knots Landing" as hoodlum Ken Forest. McArthur's biggest early splash, however, came in 1986 when Madonna plucked him out of obscurity to co-star as her wrong-side-of-the-tracks boyfriend in the video for her teen-pregnancy drama, "Papa Don't Preach," which also featured Danny Aiello as Madonna's irate father. McArthur then landed one of his most memorable roles, honest cowboy Duell McCall in "Desperado," which was originally a pilot for a TV series but instead became a series of made-for-television movies. The "Desperado" films were set apart from the usual made-for-TV fare by novelist Elmore Leonard's participation (he created the story and wrote the script for the first movie), and a superior supporting cast that included at different times Billy Dee Williams, Robert Vaughn, Rod Stieger, and John Rhys-Davies.