It was taken as read in the 1970s that all women, given the chance, would go out with him. But the star wasn\u2019t just a new man \u2013 he was a radical presence<\/p>\n
Richard O\u2019Sullivan, who has died at the age of 82, arrived in acting by accident. As a boy, he\u2019d come back from a family holiday in Ireland with a strong accent, and his parents sent him to the Corona Theatre School in London to soften it. This origin story was very much in keeping with his adult self-fashioning: blokey, lovable, down to earth, cheeky \u2013 not the kind of guy who would go to drama school for the purposes of drama. But his work as a child star was almost back to back. He filmed his first feature aged eight, as an extra in The Yellow Balloon, and the next role he landed was the lead in The Stranger\u2019s Hand, released the following year (1954). He played Audrey Hepburn\u2019s younger brother in The Nun\u2019s Story in 1959, and Elizabeth Taylor\u2019s in Cleopatra four years later. It\u2019s famously not that easy, making the child-to-adult actor transition, and the higher your profile as a junior the harder it is. It was while straddling the awkward between-years that O\u2019Sullivan appeared in two Cliff Richard flicks, The Young Ones and Wonderful Life in the early 60s, and his facility with that pastel-shaded wholesomeness fed into but only partly described the comic actor he would become.<\/p>\n
His first lead role as an adult was opposite Beryl Reid in Alcock and Gander, in 1972. Creators Johnnie Mortimer and Brian Cooke found their muse in O\u2019Sullivan. Man About the House aired the following year, with O\u2019Sullivan playing Robin Tripp, a trainee chef. The setup sounds so unremarkable now that it\u2019s hard to fathom it as a break from any norm: two women (played by Paula Wilcox and Sally Thomsett) are looking for a flatmate. It\u2019s assumed it\u2019ll be another woman who\u2019s all ready to move in; instead, O\u2019Sullivan appears in their bath after a party. It was almost an ET archetype \u2013 this alien <\/em>arrives, this man who can cook, and spices up all their lives, to great merriment \u2013 and they can only get him past the landlord by pretending he\u2019s gay.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/faa81fb4119463fe925d6324adb9e5c15ab0944a\/0_56_2814_2251\/master\/2814.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=d67122f3970d5f020c169fbf3ba569fa\" "\\"\u2018Handsome,")
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"