"My parents are in their 90s and live there (Chicago) and I just got engaged to a gal from Chicago. She's got a big Italian family, and we're probably getting married next year."

William Petersen and his girlfriend of seven years, Chicago Biology teacher Gina Cirone, are engaged. Pondering how best to pop the question, the CSI investigator decided that a reenactment of their first date might guarantee a favorable result. In December Petersen, who sees Cirone once a month, flew to Chicago, where he spoke to her high school classes. Then the couple took a long drive around the Windy City, followed by dinner at Spiaggia. Petersen, who asked for the same meal he'd eaten seven years before, gave her a 3-carat emerald-cut diamond-and platinum engagement ring. Although no wedding date has been set, Cirone plans to move to L.A. after the school year ends and continue teaching. People - Insider

Over three weeks, Petersen guided a dozen students toward a two-performance production of Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit."

In late September, Petersen and Cirone traveled to Basque region of Spain with his 21-year-old daughter, Maite. "I promised her that this summer we'd visit the place she was born," he said.

Chicago Tribune, 2-17: Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet has penned a pilot for a TV series (following a request from William Petersen). The story line? A former Chicago cop becomes a criminologist at the University of Chicago. His girlfriend is publicist at the Art Institute of Chicago. The guy who'll star? Another Chicago talent, William Petersen. NBC's interested in the project. If it gets the go-ahead, filming would start in where else? - Chicago in April.

Inspired by film: "Last Tango in Paris" was the first time that I realized that there was an art to film making and that there was a craft to acting."

"Well, the being there part is something I'm still trying to work out because, you know, I'm in the process of trying to create a situation where I'm not on the road all the time and I can be around for my loved ones too."

"It doesn't hurt to be in Montana," he acknowledges. "My brother lives out there, my daughter lives out there, and I'm out there all the time. I would just sit up there and make Westerns my whole life if I had the opportunity."

He has his own production company, High Horse Films, that he and business partner Cindy Chvatal formed, he says, "to bridge the gaps between what film roles I'm offered and what I'm going to do."

"In "Tooth of Crime" I was having a knife fight, the guy's having a knife fight on the stage, an imaginary one with himself and I missed." He was taken to the emergency room and, after losing consciousness, saw an image of himself lying on a moving sidewalk, headed toward a white light. "The closer I got, the more I wanted to get there,' he says. "I could actually see and feel and hear love coming out of this light." A voice said, "Stop it!" and brought him back to consciousness. "I don't fear the afterlife." "I believe some sort of great thing happens in death," he says. "Death," he says, "is a good thing."

"I had to lasso a chair in front of my girlfriend cause I was showing off. I dragged the chair across the stage and I had rigged the chair with these screws. I would loosen them up before the show so I could break the back of the chair over my head just to show off. One night I broke the chair and the screw went right into my neck. And I thought for a second I had done the jugular because it was just pouring blood and I thought "uh-oh. 'My career's over in ten seconds, like done and gone.' Then I realized it wasn't but I had to keep doing the show and I couldn't stop the blood. Eventually I took my shirt off and tied it around my neck." ("Fool for Love")

"After my divorce, I was like a kid in a candy store, trying to find the kind of candy I liked best, which of course just makes all the candy taste worse."

He spent most nights taking part in theater productions at Boise State University and Lewis & Clark College, despite the fact that he was not enrolled at either institution.

Moved to Spain with his girlfriend, Joanne Brady, and studied Shakespeare with a British teacher named John Woodward. The couple was married during their stay near San Sebastian in the Pyrenees and had a daughter, Maite (Basque for "my little love"), before returning to the U.S.