Actor Richard O'Sullivan, Star of 'Man About the House', Dies at 82

British actor Richard O'Sullivan has died at the age of 82, according to a tribute published by The Guardian's culture section on Sunday.

The Guardian reported that O'Sullivan came to acting largely by accident. As a child, he returned from a family holiday in Ireland with a strong accent, and his parents enrolled him at the Corona Theatre School in London to help soften it, according to the report.

Despite this unplanned start, O'Sullivan's work as a child actor came in rapid succession, the article said. He filmed his first feature at age eight as an extra in "The Yellow Balloon," and the following year landed the lead role in "The Stranger's Hand" (1954), per the report. He went on to play Audrey Hepburn's younger brother in "The Nun's Story" (1959) and Elizabeth Taylor's brother in "Cleopatra" (1963), The Guardian noted.

The transition from child star to adult actor is notoriously difficult, the article observed, and O'Sullivan navigated this period by appearing in two Cliff Richard films, "The Young Ones" and "Wonderful Life," in the early 1960s. According to The Guardian, his ability to convey a certain wholesome charm in these roles fed into, though did not fully define, the comic actor he would later become.

His first lead role as an adult came in 1972 opposite Beryl Reid in "Alcock and Gander," the report said. Writers Johnnie Mortimer and Brian Cooke reportedly found in O'Sullivan a muse for their work, which led to his best-known role the following year in "Man About the House," where he played Robin Tripp, a trainee chef.

The Guardian's tribute described the sitcom's premise, in which two women, played by Paula Wilcox and Sally Thomsett, seeking a female flatmate instead found O'Sullivan's character in their bathtub after a party. The article characterized O'Sullivan's arrival on television during this era as almost alien-like — a new kind of leading man who could cook and who, in the culture of the 1970s, was assumed to be universally desirable to women, while also representing what the piece called a radical departure from convention.