Richard O'Sullivan, the star of the 1970s sitcom Man About the House, has died at the age of 82. The actor, who began his career as a child performer and first appeared on screen at the age of seven, went on to a major television career playing youthful characters that embodied the social and sexual freedoms of the post-1960s era.
A trailblazing run of hit sitcoms
Between 1972 and 1981, O'Sullivan appeared in more than 100 episodes of peak-time ITV comedies, portraying funny, frisky men in their 20s and 30s. His first notable role was as Dr Lawrence Bingham in the hospital sitcom Doctor in Charge, where his cheeky charm led to his career-defining casting as Robin Tripp in Man About the House in the mid-1970s, and its spin-off, Robin's Nest, a few years later.
In Man About the House, Robin shared a flat with two young single women, Chrissy (Paula Wilcox) and Jo (Sally Thomsett). The living arrangements were platonic, partly to appease the TV regulator, from whom formal approval had been sought to show a "mixed" house, but also to establish a sexual tension that was unusual for mid-evening shows. In the sequel, Robin had qualified as a chef and, again daringly for the time, was living with a woman to whom he was not married.
From screen heartthrob to legendary highwayman
The attractiveness of screen actors has become a contentious issue amid concerns about performers being objectified for looks rather than talent. But O'Sullivan had both, and after a role in the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor movie Cleopatra, a Hollywood career seemed possible. In Man About the House, O'Sullivan, Wilcox, and Thomsett offered something for every viewer, as long as they were heterosexual.
A running gag in the show was that Robin was gay, a ruse designed to neutralise the living arrangements in the eyes of their landlords, George and Mildred, played by Brian Murphy and Yootha Joyce. The humour, however, depended on Robin projecting randy straightness.
The sexiness of O'Sullivan's onscreen persona, which even the period male fashion for knitted tank tops did little to dampen, was helped by reports of relationships with female co-stars and front-page tabloid coverage when Tessa Wyatt, his onscreen girlfriend in Robin's Nest, left her then husband, DJ Tony Blackburn, to replicate the role off-screen.
Man About the House spawned one of the most formidable franchises in British TV, with Robin's Nest running alongside George and Mildred, the spin-off featuring Murphy and Joyce. Core audiences of tens of millions for O'Sullivan's two sitcoms gave him an audience-drawing power that ITV was keen to capitalise on, casting him as another telegenic rebel, the legendary highwayman Dick Turpin, which ran from 1979 to 1982.
Later career and final years
As that series ended, O'Sullivan faced the challenge of moving on from representing the fun of the young. In Me and My Girl in the 1980s, he played a grey-haired widower, with the female lead as his teenage daughter, played by Joanne Ridley. The programme benefited from unusually short gaps between series due to fears that Ridley would age faster than the teenager she was playing.
When Me and My Girl ended, O'Sullivan had starred in five successive hit series, with the recognition and wealth that such exposure brings. Sadly, there was little more to come. Due to declining health, his final screen credit was in 1996, and after a stroke in 2002, he was cared for at the Brinsworth House entertainers' retirement home in London.
A career ended by ill-health would be a misfortune for any performer, but a small consolation in O'Sullivan's case is that an actor who specialised in projecting youthful vitality and energy remains forever so on rerun channels.
