Before Richard O'Sullivan became the young man cooking for two flatmates in Man About the House, he had already played a kidnapped boy, a royal child and a pharaoh on screen. O'Sullivan, the English actor whose easy comic presence made Robin Tripp a mainstay of 1970s British television, died on September 4, 2026, at Brinsworth House in Twickenham. He was 82.

O'Sullivan was born in Chiswick, west London, on May 7, 1944. An interest in tap dancing took him to the Corona Stage Academy, and at eight he appeared as a Sunday school boy in the 1953 thriller The Yellow Balloon. In 1956 he joined Peter Hall's production of Love's Labour's Lost at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford. According to The Guardian, he accumulated more than 20 cinema roles over the decade after his debut. They included a kidnapped son in The Stranger's Hand, a young royal in Dangerous Exile, a schoolboy ringleader in Carry On Teacher and Ptolemy XIII alongside Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.

That childhood work became the foundation for his transition into adult roles. O'Sullivan found his television footing as the rule-bound Dr Lawrence Bingham in Doctor at Large in 1971 and Doctor in Charge from 1972 to 1973. He then played Richard Gander opposite Beryl Reid in Alcock and Gander, the immediate step before the role that defined his career.

Man About the House placed O'Sullivan's Robin Tripp, a trainee chef, in an Earl's Court flat with Chrissy, played by Paula Wilcox, and Jo, played by Sally Thomsett. A Guardian retrospective recorded that ITV premiered the show in August 1973 and that it ran for six successful series. O'Sullivan gave the changing social setup a genial centre, while Robin's competence in the kitchen helped turn familiar domestic assumptions sideways.

The programme expanded well beyond its original flat. It produced the British spin-offs George and Mildred and Robin's Nest, while its American remake, Three's Company, produced two further spin-offs. Robin's Nest moved Robin into a bistro and ran for six series from 1977 to 1981. O'Sullivan carried the same character into a new stage of life and wrote the show's theme tune as well.

He also proved that Robin Tripp did not contain the whole of his range. From 1979 to 1982 he took the title role in Dick Turpin, exchanging the sitcom kitchen for a period adventure built around the romanticised highwayman. He returned to sustained comedy success as Simon Harrap, an advertising executive raising a teenage daughter, in six series of Me and My Girl from 1984 to 1988. His last sitcom, Trouble in Mind, followed in 1991, with O'Sullivan playing the retired psychiatrist Adam Charlesworth.

Brinsworth House, the Royal Variety Charity's care home for members of the entertainment profession, was O'Sullivan's home for 23 years. In October 2021 he and fellow resident Mike Yarwood attended a cherry-tree planting on its lawn for the Queen's Green Canopy and the forthcoming Platinum Jubilee. The Royal Variety Charity announced his death and said he was survived by his son, James, who thanked his father's fans for their support.

James offered a private measure of the qualities viewers saw in public: "My dad was as funny and charming in real life as he appeared on our TV screens over the years," he said in a tribute reported by The Independent. He described O'Sullivan as a kind-spirited father and grandfather, and said reruns had allowed him to appreciate work made before he was born.

O'Sullivan's career linked distinct eras of British entertainment: postwar children's films, Shakespeare at Stratford, widescreen historical spectacle and the studio sitcom at its mass-audience height. The boy framed in The Stranger's Hand grew into Robin Tripp at the stove, Dick Turpin in the saddle and Simon Harrap negotiating family life. Those performances, along with the theme he wrote for Robin's Nest, remain a vivid record of an actor who made the difficult journey from child performer to enduring television lead.