Francis Jameson Parker Jr. (born November 18, 1947) is an American actor, best known for his roles as the first Brad Vernon in the soap opera One Life to Live, and as A.J.

His father had been general legal counsel for the Parker family steel mill, an investment analyst, and government attorney (working first with the Maryland Public Expenditure Council and later with the United States Naval Reserve).

His widow married her husband's Harvard Law School friend, Lewis Metcalfe Walling, a former New Deal labor attorney, in 1974.

He was cast as Dale Robinson in the daytime drama Somerset and created the role of Brad Vernon on One Life to Live.

Parker made his motion picture debut in The Bell Jar (1979) and starred in A Small Circle of Friends (1980), in which he played one of three radical college students during the 1960s.

In addition, he played the leads in several CBS television movies: Women at West Point (1979),[9] Anatomy of a Seduction (1979),[10] The Gathering II (1979), The Promise of Love (1980), Callie and Son (1981), and A Caribbean Mystery (1983).

[11] After completing this movie, he returned to Beloit College to star in a live summer stock theatrical production as Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

[13] He became a freelance writer for a variety of hard-copy and on-line magazines and wrote several books, among them the biography An Accidental Cowboy about his life after acting.

[citation needed] On October 1, 1992, Parker was shot in the left armpit and right arm by a neighbor during a verbal altercation concerning dog waste.