DAVID SOUL
(28 August 1943 - 4 January 2024)
Originally an American citizen, the actor and singer David Soul, who has died from obstructive pulmonary disease at the age of 80, had a reasonable US career but chose eventually to live in Britain. He became famous as Sergeant Kenneth ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson in the television series Starsky and Hutch, in a professional partnership with Paul Michael Glaser as Sergeant David Michael Starsky, working for the Southern California Police. There were four seasons of the series which ran to nearly a hundred episodes from 1975 to 1979. Their signature mode of transport was flying around in a squad car in the Los Angeles beach community of San Pedro and generally colliding with anything that got in their way. The show also featured Antonio Fargas as their informant Huggy Bear, the fount of much underworld news. The show was so popular that it was even parodied by Morecambe and Wise.
Soul was born David Richard Solberg in Chicago to a Norwegian family, father Richard, a Lutheran minister and academic, and mother, June, a teacher. As his father was an agent for Lutheran World Relief, the family toured Europe. After Washington High School, he moved to Mexico City and the University of the Americas, acquired a taste for music, learned to play guitar and began appearing on stage, but as a founder member of Firehouse Theatre in Minneapolis he had been acting since the 1960s.
Following some theatre, Soul performed on television in The Merv Griffin Show as the ‘Covered Man’ singing incognito. He also appeared in Flipper, Star Trek, The Streets of San Francisco and worked with Clint Eastwood on Magnum Force. After five years on Starsky and Hutch, he made many more TV appearances including starring with James Mason in the Stephen King miniseries Salem’s Lot. Going back to singing, he had a couple of hits with ‘Don’t Give Up On Us’ which went to No. 1 in the US and UK charts, and ‘Silver Lady’, which was also a hit in Britain. He had several more successful singles and albums and he toured the world.
Among his later TV shows was Casablanca, based on the classic 1942 romantic drama, with Soul playing Rick Blaine, the Bogart character, but it was not a success.
During the 1990s Soul moved to the UK to work on the London stage in Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers and took over from Michael Brandon in the title role of Jerry Springer - The Opera, a controversial production later televised by the BBC. He also played the film producer Mack Sennett in a revival of Mack and Mabel with Janie Dee. His film career ended with a cameo (alongside Glaser) in the 2004 feature of Starsky and Hutch alongside Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. Soul’s last film appearance was a spot lip-syncing ‘Silver Lady’ (at the wheel of a car!) in Filth, Jon S. Baird’s blackly comic police procedural with James McAvoy.
David Soul was married five times. His first wife was Miriam Russeth in 1964 and they had a son, Chris, but the marriage ended after 18 months. Then he married the actress and fellow Scandinavian Karen Carlson who he met working in television. The marriage lasted nine years from 1968, and they have a son, Jon-Kristjian. In 1980 he married Patti Carnet-Sherman, but Soul had a drink problem and attacked Patti while she was pregnant. They reconciled but divorced in 1986. His last wife was the UK theatre publicist Helen Snell from 2010, after he had obtained UK citizenship. He had finally found his soulmate.
MICHAEL DARVELL