Wally Fong/AP
LONDON — Actor-singer David Soul, a Nineteen Seventies heartthrob who co-starred because the blond half of the crime-fighting duo “Starsky & Hutch” and topped the music charts with the ballad “Do not Give Up on Us,” has died on the age of 80.
His spouse, Helen Snell, mentioned Friday that “David Soul – beloved husband, father, grandfather and brother – died yesterday after a valiant battle for all times within the loving firm of household.”
“He shared many extraordinary items on the planet as actor, singer, storyteller, artistic artist and expensive pal,” Snell mentioned in an announcement. “His smile, laughter and keenness for all times will likely be remembered by the numerous whose lives he has touched.”
Born David Solberg, Soul was a Chicago native whose performing profession dated again to the Sixties, when he joined the avant-garde Firehouse Theater in Minnesota. He continued to look on stage and display screen nicely into the twentieth century, however he was finest identified for his work within the Nineteen Seventies.
Soul portrayed detective Ken “Hutch” Hutchinson alongside dark-haired Paul Michael Glaser as detective David Starsky in “Starsky & Hutch, which ran on ABC from 1975 to 1979 and grew so widespread it spawned a line of kids’s toys.
John D McHugh/AP
He additionally had success as a singer, beginning in 1976 with “Do not Give Up on Us” and following with such hits as “Getting in With My Eyes Open” and “Silver Woman.”
Soul first gained nationwide fame within the Sixties showing on “The Merv Griffin Present” as “The Coated Man,” a singer disguised in a stocking cap who shouted out lyrics reminiscent of “That’s the reason I cover my face, as a result of a person must be free.”
His different TV credit included early appearances on “Star Trek,” “All within the Household” and “I Dream of Jeannie,” the miniseries “Salem’s Lot” and a short-lived model of the movie traditional “Casablanca,” by which Soul took on Humphrey Bogart’s position as nightclub proprietor Rock Blaine.
Soul’s motion pictures included “Magnum Power,” “The Hanoi Hilton” and a cameo with Glaser within the 2004 big-screen remake of “Starsky & Hutch,” starring Ben Stiller as Starsky and Owen Wilson as Hutch.
By the Nineties, Soul had moved to Britain, the place he carried out a number of stage roles. In 2001, he gained a libel case in opposition to a journalist who known as “The Useless Monkey,” a play that Soul was in, the worst manufacturing he had ever seen – with out having seen it. He additionally performed the titular talk-show host in “Jerry Springer – The Opera” in London’s West Finish.