The tall and rubber-faced Richard Mulligan, who died on September 26th aged 67, portrayed Burt Campell, the craziest of all the crazy characters in the spoof American TV soap opera, Soap. With brilliant comic timing and an ability to make his subject both real and sympathetic despite the circumstances, it was Richard Mulligan's most celebrated role in a career that stretched from the late 1950s until recent times.
Chronicling the lives of two very different families - the wealthy Tates and the struggling Campbells - made Soap a huge hit with audiences on both sides of the Atlantic from 1977 to 1981. In it, the bewildered, blue-collar Campbell tried to adjust to his new life as the second husband of bubble-headed Mary, with her two sons, one a mobster, the other a gay ventriloquist.
Although he appeared in more than a dozen feature films, Richard Mulligan found his true home in above-average TV sitcoms, such as Soap and the more conventional Empty Nest (19881995), for both of which he won Emmy awards. In the latter, he played Dr Henry Weston, a paediatrician widower living with three adult daughters and a large dog called Dreyfuss as confidant.
Richard Mulligan was married and divorced four times, having had a son by his first wife. His second wife was the actress Joan Hackett, opposite whom he played a weak husband in The Group (1966), Sidney Lumet's uneasy cross between satire and soap opera. His last marriage (in 1992) to Serina Robinson, a 32year-old former porn star, lasted only 10 months and ended bitterly, with Richard Mulligan suing Robinson over her account of the break-up in a tabloid.
Born in the Bronx, the son of a New York Irish-Catholic policeman, Richard Mulligan served in the US navy before studying to become a playwright at Columbia University. One day, while delivering a play to a community theatre, he was asked by the director to audition for the role of Andrew Mayo, a farmer's son in the Eugene O'Neill drama, Beyond the Horizon.
"I thought, if I'm going to write for actors, maybe I should know better what it is that actors do," Richard Mulligan explained later. "So I decided to do the audition. And I hated it. But they called and told me that I was the guy. So I did the part again, in pursuit of knowing what it is actors do, and eventually got bit by the acting bug."
Richard Mulligan got his first Broadway opportunity in 1960, in the Arthur Penn production of All the Way Home. Ten years later, Penn asked him to play a psychotic Gen Custer, demystifying the legend in his revisionist western, Little Big Man. Richard Mulligan, who was superb in the part, had made his feature film debut in a small dramatic role in Love With The Proper Stranger (1963), directed by his brother Robert.
He seldom had a chance to be serious in films again. In the disaster spoof motive, The Big Bus (1976), he was a husband celebrating his divorce with his ex-wife, and in Teachers (1984) he played a nutty professor who dresses up as Custer and George Washington during history lessons, and turns out to be an escaped mental patient.
Richard Mulligan was also in four of his friend Blake Edwards's strained farces, the best being the bile-filled satire S.O.B. (1981), in which he played a film director turning a disastrous family musical into a hit porn movie. In order to pull it off, he needs to convince his female lead and wife (Julie Andrews, Edwards's wife) to defy her squeaky-clean public image by baring her breasts.
Richard Mulligan, who had just finished in Soap, thus consolidated his reputation for playing odd-ball characters.
Richard Mulligan: born 1932; died, September 2000