Actor John Corbett has won over audiences playing Aidan Shaw, the down-to-earth boyfriend of Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw on “Sex and the City.” Fans were ecstatic when he returned for the second season of “And Just Like That…” However, Corbett grew up in West Virginia with his mother and stepfather before becoming an actor.

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 musicians like Waylon Jennings and Buck Owens perform, and eventually, his mother brought his first guitar. Corbett didn’t stay focused on a music career and later moved to Southern California to work in a steel plant with his dad.

In an essay in Guideposts in 2017, he said, “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. 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, Corbett enrolled in community college at his father’s suggestion, where he met friends who invited him to an improv class.

He later switched his focus and enrolled as an acting student, taking classes in fighting and ballet. He was immediately hooked on performing. Before his first credited gig on an episode of “The Wonder Years,” Corbett supported himself as a hairdresser, telling the Riverfront Times he was licensed in 1986 and joking that “you have to admit I still have pretty great hair. In fact, a lot of people think I must wear a wig.”

At almost 30, Corbett got his first big break, landing the role of Chris Stevens on the CBS series “Nothern Exposure.” It was his first taste of fame, and he admitted he struggled with people focusing on his height and looks. Once the series ended, Corbett continued acting in films like “Serendipity” and “Volcano” before he landed his role as Aidan on “Sex and the City.” Corbett told The New York Times he initially turned down the role but changed his mind after meeting the creator.

It was during the height of his initial “Sex and the City” fame when Corbett met Bo Derek on a blind date in 2002. He told People in 2010, eight years into the relationship, he wasn’t as laid back as some of his on-screen characters might suggest. “I’m an only child. I’m not patient. I’m not a good listener,” he said at the time. But when he met Derek, he found someone he felt understood him. “It took somebody with infinite patience and almost zero ego to stick around me longer than three weeks,” he told the outlet.

The couple have been together ever since that first meeting, living along the central coast of California, clearly enjoying each other’s company. Bo, who was previously married to actor-director John Derek until he died in 1998, told Fox News Digital in 2020 she “didn’t expect to end up with anyone again” until she met Corbett.

However, regarding marriage, Derek said the couple didn’t feel the need to tie the knot. That changed in 2020, when the couple secretly wed near the end of the year, keeping the news well guarded until Corbett appeared on “The Talk” the following year. Corbett said, “After 20 years, we decided to get married. We didn’t want 2020 to be that thing that everybody looked back at and hated. We thought, ‘Well, let’s get one nice thing out of it.’”

John Corbett may have humble beginnings, but nothing means more to him than his marriage to Bo Derek and his family.