Growing up on Long Island, he served with the Marine Corps during World War II and the Korean War.
He was born with the rather unrugged name of Eugene Carey on July 15, 1925, in Hackensack, New Jersey. He lived pretty much out of the saddle after that, enjoying the patriarchal role for nearly three decades. Tall, blond and of rugged proportions, handsome actor Philip Carey started out as a standard 1950s film actor in westerns, war stories and crime yarns but didn't achieve full-fledged stardom until well past age 50 when he joined the daytime line-up as ornery Texas tycoon Asa Buchanan on the popular soap One Life to Live (1968) in 1979.
