Richard O’Sullivan, comic actor with a lopsided grin best-known for Man About the House and Robin’s Nest

Telegraph ObituariesFri, September 4, 2026 at 11:36 AM UTC

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O’Sullivan with Paula Wilcox, left, and Sally Thomsett in Man About the House - Bert Hill/TV Times via Getty Images

Richard O’Sullivan, who has died aged 82, was a professional child actor who managed to clear the hurdle that trips up so many young performers by going on to star in at least half a dozen long-running, prime-time and enormously successful television series as an adult in the 1970s and 1980s.

O’Sullivan’s status as a competent screen performer was honed from the age of eight, when he won his first film role, and was developed over the following two decades until he was given lead parts in various successful, if lightweight, situation comedies. His best-known work probably came with the ITV shows Man About the House and one of its spin-off series, Robin’s Nest. Both attracted audiences of up to 16 million at their peak. One rather more adventurous role, playing the eponymous hero in the family favourite Dick Turpin, followed these.

In The Stranger’s Hand (1954) - STUDIOCANAL FILMS/Alamy

But if in his heyday O’Sullivan was considered something of a lovable heart-throb, his boyish looks and relaxed on-screen manner hid a more complex figure. His later life was, as he would say in rare interviews, overshadowed by alcoholism and depression, conditions which probably helped bring about a premature end to what had been a flourishing career.

The son of a mechanic, Richard Thomas O’Sullivan was born in London on May 7 1944 and grew up in Chiswick. His parents were strict Roman Catholics and expected their son to attend twice-weekly church, where he served as an altar boy. From an early age O’Sullivan attracted attention.

Whether by unwittingly setting fire to a priest’s cassock during mass, or through his work as a child model and in knitting-pattern advertisements, he seemed destined for a career in the spotlight. Even a childhood accident with a cricket ball gave him what the trademark lopsided grin that drew innumerable female fans.

As Ptolemy in Cleopatra, 1963 - LANDMARK MEDIA / Alamy

O’Sullivan was enrolled at the Corona Academy stage school in London at an early age by his concerned parents, to help him lose an Irish accent that they thought he had picked up after a family holiday in Cork. According to him more interested in having a legitimate excuse for missing school proper than in seeking fame, he nonetheless thrived there, making his acting debut in 1954 playing Peter Finch’s character as a boy in the film Make Me An Offer.

Later the same year he played Trevor Howard’s son in The Stranger’s Hand. He appeared regularly in about 20 other British films throughout his childhood and adolescence, including It’s Great to Be Young (1956) with John Mills, Carry on Teacher (1959), and the Cliff Richard vehicle The Young Ones (1961).

The frequency with which he worked throughout these early years earned young Richard a modest fortune, but his parents ensured that he did not squander it: they limited him to just 17 and a half pence a week in pocket money until he was 16. By the time he was 17, though, parts had begun to dry up, and his schoolboy looks belied his true age. “Either I sounded old enough but looked too young, or I looked young enough but sounded too old,” he said later. “Up until then I hadn’t even considered doing anything else with my life.”

In Summer Holiday, 1964, with Cliff Richard, Melvyn Hayes and Una Stubbs - Studio Canal/Shutterstock

Even so, there was fairly steady film work until the middle of the 1960s, including an appearance in one of the epics of the decade, Cleopatra (1963), in which O’Sullivan played Ptolemy opposite Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Despite spending eight months on location in Italy for the role, O’Sullivan was required for a total of just eight days’ filming. To his delight he was also flown to London each weekend so he could watch his favourite football team, Chelsea, play. “Those were the days,” he later reminisced.

After this he appeared in two more light musicals, Wonderful Life (1964), again with Cliff Richard, and Every Day’s a Holiday (also known as Seaside Swingers) the following year. In 1966, a BBC sitcom starring Leslie Phillips called Foreign Affairs in which he played the part of a post-room boy. Although it ran for only six episodes, the programme turned out to be pivotal to O’Sullivan’s career, introducing his light-comedy talents to the writing partnership of Johnnie Mortimer and Brian Cooke, the duo who penned his later successes Man About the House and Robin’s Nest.

The rest of the 1960s were not as kind to O’Sullivan. He found it increasingly difficult to locate regular acting work, appearing only occasionally in television plays, and just one more film that decade, the lacklustre spy drama A Dandy in Aspic (1968) with Tom Courtenay and Mia Farrow. Forced to take a job outside his chosen profession, O’Sullivan worked briefly as a pump attendant at his father’s garage until he was sacked for incompetence, having mistakenly undercharged customers. He also drove a taxi for a few months.

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By 1971 he was on the verge of quitting acting altogether – until an ITV sitcom with an established pedigree came to the rescue. In the 29-episode series Doctor at Large, made by London Weekend Television and inspired by Richard Gordon’s “Doctor” books, O’Sullivan won recognition as the wimpish, pompous sycophant Dr Bingham. That same year he appeared alongside Ronnie Corbett in the first series of the BBC One sitcom Now Look Here… before returning to ITV to team up with Mortimer and Cooke again for the short-lived comedy Alcock and Gander, co-starring Beryl Reid.

In Doctor in Charge, 1973 - ITV/Shutterstock

Now established on the sitcom circuit, in 1972 O’Sullivan was called back to reprise the role of Bingham for two series of LWT’s Doctor in Charge before, the following year, taking top billing as Robin Tripp in Mortimer and Cooke’s Man About the House.

The premise of Thames TV’s Man About the House, in which O’Sullivan’s likeable catering student shares a flat with two girls (played by Sally Thomsett and Paula Wilcox) was considered risqué, if somewhat flimsy, at the time. It relied on the tension of a well-worn theme: would Robin manage to get one of the girls (Paula Wilcox’s Chrissy) into bed?

After six series spread over three years, Robin’s deficiencies as a long-term proposition are highlighted when Chrissy ends up marrying Robin’s brother Norman. The programme fared much better, though, spawning a 1974 feature film and two spin-off series, one of which, Robin’s Nest, was created for O’Sullivan, who also composed its theme music.

With Tessa Wyatt in Robin’s Nest - Bert Hill/TV Times via Getty Images

In the show O’Sullivan’s character was now running his own bistro and, initially, “living in sin” with his girlfriend Vicky (Tessa Wyatt). Again, the programme ran for six series – plus two Christmas specials – and attracted huge audiences. It was also notable for being the first British sitcom to depict a “common-law marriage” scenario. Its creators had to seek permission from the Independent Broadcasting Authority before being able to go ahead with the idea.

O’Sullivan’s next role marked a departure for him. He played the 18th-century highwayman Dick Turpin, a loveable villain from the Robin Hood school, in the ITV series of the same name. Aimed chiefly at a young audience and broadcast in the Saturday “teatime” slot, Dick Turpin, for which O’Sullivan learnt to ride and performed some of his own stunts, was another success, and ran for four series from 1979 to 1982.

In 1984 O’Sullivan returned to his familiar territory, the ITV sitcom, this time portraying the widowed advertising executive Simon Harrap in Me and My Girl. The plot mostly revolved around Harrap’s attempts to bring up his teenage daughter and romance women without worrying her. The formula worked well, however, and the show ran until 1988, with Tim Brooke-Taylor and Joan Sanderson among the supporting cast.

Me and My Girl was to be O’Sullivan’s last television success. In 1991 another ITV sitcom, this time starring O’Sullivan as a middle-aged psychiatrist married to a landscape gardener (Susan Penhaligon), Trouble in Mind, was axed because of poor ratings. It marked a decline in the actor’s professional and personal fortunes.

O’Sullivan as Dick Turpin, 1978 - United News/Popperfoto

Throughout his lengthy career O’Sullivan appeared frequently in pantomime and in regional and West End theatre. In 1983, in collaboration with the childbirth guru Betty Parsons, he narrated an album aimed at soothing the fears of expectant fathers. Latterly he took sporadic voiceover work in TV commercials.

An accomplished pianist and cook, O’Sullivan always maintained that he was happiest in his own company. He was fiercely protective of his private life and spent his final years living quietly at Brinsworth House, the home for entertainers at Twickenham.

Richard O’Sullivan married first, in 1971, Diana Terry. The marriage was dissolved in 1974. He and Tessa Wyatt, his co-star in Robin’s Nest, had a son together in 1983. In 1988 he married, secondly, Christine Smart. They were divorced in 1993.

Richard O’Sullivan, born May 7 1944, death announced September 9 2026

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”