Born in London in 1944, O’Sullivan started his career as a child actor in the 50s and 60s, playing uncredited roles in dramas in 1953.
He went on to appear, external in the Children’s Film Foundation’s first serial production Raiders of the River, and in 1956 he was in Sir Peter Hall’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre Stratford.
He also appeared in 1961 film Spare the Rod, a social commentary drama about a teacher working in a tough, deprived area, starring Max Bygraves and Donald Pleasance. O’Sullivan played a difficult and defiant student in his final year.
After gaining steady work in dramatic roles, including 1963’s Cleopatra, as Pharoah Ptolemy XIII, which starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, he moved towards comedy, in shows such as The Ronnie Barker Playhouse, in 1968, and The Galton and Simpson Comedy the following year.
Ray Galton and Alan Simpson went on to create the sitcoms Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe and Son.
O’Sullivan was also in two films with Sir Cliff Richard in the 1960s – The Young Ones in 1961 and Wonderful Life in 1964.
By 1973, he took his starring role in Man About the House, which was a big success, not least because of its daring plot about a man living with two single women.
“The issue was not the living arrangement itself, but what it implied,” British Comedy Classics said, external of the series.
“A man sharing a flat with two unmarried women would be read as sexual, and that risked the show being rejected or framed as inappropriate for prime-time viewing.”
In order to bypass any potential disapproval from their landlords, George and Mildred Roper, who also got their own spin-off TV series, the two women claim their flatmate Robin is gay.
Robin keeps up the pretence for their landlords, which created the comedy and made it acceptable watching for a pre-watershed 70s audience.
Between 1979 and 1982 he took on the more dramatic titlular role of 18th Century highwayman Dick Turpin, in ITV’s series.
But by the 80s he returned to sitcoms with Me and My Girl, which ran from 1984 to 1988, and Trouble in Mind in 1991, about a married psychiatrist who is having something of a mid-life crisis.
After this his career became much quieter, with an appearance in Noel’s House Party and a starring role in a 1996 film called Holed, about a golfing match.
In his statement, James O’Sullivan concluded: “Always kind-spirited, good humoured, a doting grandfather and a wonderful dad – I will miss him dearly.”
