David Soul, who has died aged 80, stormed to fame in the 1970s as half of the television “buddies” detective duo Starsky and Hutch, who careered across Los Angeles in their red and white Ford Gran Torino, over the roofs and bonnets of other cars, and through piles of cardboard boxes.
“When the Starsky and Hutch series was showing, police on patrol duty were adopting sunglasses and wearing their gloves with the cuffs turned down,” claimed Kenneth Oxford, a British chief constable. “They also started driving like bloody maniacs.” In south London, a council lowered a wall after fans of the tyre-squealing screen action used it as a launchpad to jump on to parked vehicles.
While Paul Michael Glaser played the streetwise, cardigan-wearing, junk food-eating Dave Starsky, Soul’s character, Ken “Hutch” Hutchinson, was the quieter, yoga-loving, healthy-eating one – two cool cops looking after each other as if they were brothers.
Over five series (1975-79), they patrolled a rough area populated by muggers, drug dealers, sex workers and pimps. They also fraternised with Huggy Bear (played by Antonio Fargas), a snazzily dressed, “jive-talking” informant with his own bar.
Soul traded on his newfound stardom to return to his first love, music. He recorded the ballads Don’t Give Up on Us (1976), a No 1 in the US and UK, and Silver Lady (1977), another British chart-topper.
His television career continued, but the starring roles rarely resonated beyond his homeland. An exception was the miniseries World War III (1982), in which he played an American cold war colonel trying to avert a nuclear holocaust. It also chimed with his political and social campaigning, which included supporting the anti-nuclear movement.
He took up the tempting offer to play Rick Blaine in Casablanca (1983), a five-part TV prequel to the film classic, in the role originally played by Humphrey Bogart, but it proved a flop.
Soul found renewed success – particularly on the West End stage – after moving to Britain in the 90s. He even hit the headlines beyond the review pages in the title role of Jerry Springer the Opera (Cambridge theatre, 2004-05), taking over from another American actor, Michael Brandon, as the “shock” talkshow host.
The BBC’s decision to screen Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee’s musical, complete with thousands of swear words, transvestites, tap-dancers dressed as Ku Klux Klan members and a nappy-wearing Jesus, received more than 60,000 complaints from viewers.
Soul simply relished the chance to fulfil his “dream to play in the birthplace of English-speaking theatre” after failing to “cut the mustard” when auditioning on Broadway.
He was born David Solberg in Chicago to June (nee Nelson), a teacher who had also performed as a singer, and Richard Solberg, a Lutheran minister of Norwegian descent. His father’s work as a representative of the Lutheran World Relief organisation during the reconstruction of Germany after the second world war meant the family moved to Berlin in 1949, returning to the US seven years later to live in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where David attended Washington high school.
He then acted in plays while studying at Augustana College, before moving to Mexico with his family. Influenced by his father’s work, he initially had plans to join the diplomatic service, and learned Spanish and studied Latin American history. He was also taught to play the guitar by Mexican students.
After a year, he hitchhiked to the US, landed a job singing Mexican folk songs at a coffee shop in Minneapolis and set his sights on a career in music. He also gained some acting experience with the city’s Firehouse theatre company.
While talking with friends about the metaphorical masks people wear, he came up with the idea of wearing a real one while performing so that the music stood on its own merits, and billed himself “David Soul, the Covered Man”. The William Morris Agency signed him up after hearing a demo tape, and he soon had bookings. One was in The Merv Griffin Show on TV between 1966 and 1968, when he eventually dispensed with the mask. More significantly, a talent agent spotted his acting potential.
He had a regular role in Here Come the Brides (1968-70), a comedy western series set after the civil war, as Joshua Bolt, one of the brothers running a logging company in a male-dominated Seattle frontier town and importing marriageable women.
A guest star, Karen Carlson, became Soul’s second wife (1968-77), following the dissolution of his first marriage, to Mirriam “Mim” Russeth, in 1966, three years after their wedding.
Soul was then popping up all over American TV in guest roles himself, and had a short run in 1974 as Ted Warrick, the defence lawyer’s assistant, in Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law, before wider fame came in Starsky and Hutch. By then, he was living in an “open” relationship with another actor, Lynne Marta. When he moved on to his third marriage, to Patti (nee Carnel, 1980-86), former wife of the 60s pop idol Bobby Sherman, he hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
In 1982, having already struck Patti several times, he returned home drunk one night following a day’s filming on Casablanca – which he correctly feared would bomb – and hit her repeatedly. He was arrested on a charge of misdemeanour battery, but a judge spared him jail on condition that he underwent therapy. Soul admitted to having a violent streak and, although he and Patti were reunited, the marriage was soon over.
He kept working, landing starring roles as Roy Champion in the cattle ranch soap-style drama The Yellow Rose (1983-84), the private eye of the title in the TV movie Harry’s Hong Kong (1987), and “Wes” Grayson, leading an FBI forensics team, in Unsub (1989), but his star was on the wane. Another marriage, to Julia Nickson (1987-1993), also failed, before he had a relationship with the actor-singer Alexa Hamilton.
Soul’s career was revived when in 1995 the theatre producer Bill Kenwright was looking for an American to star in the comedy thriller Catch Me If You Can on tour in Britain. He played Corban, a newlywed whose wife goes missing. There were other tours and Soul was in the West End as Hank in The Dead Monkey (Whitehall, now Trafalgar, theatre, 1998), Chandler Tate in Alan Ayckbourn’s Comic Potential (Lyric, 1999-2000) and Mack in Mack & Mabel (Criterion, 2006).
In between, he had one-off roles on British television, including as a locum surgeon in two episodes of Holby City (2001 and 2002), a Boston detective helping to investigate his wife’s murder in Dalziel and Pascoe (2004) and a criminology lecturer in Inspector Lewis (2012). Soul and Glaser had cameos in the 2004 film spoof Starsky & Hutch, alongside Ben Stiller as Starsky and Owen Wilson as Hutch. In the same year, Soul was granted British citizenship.
He is survived by his fifth wife, Helen (nee Snell), whom he married in 2010, and five sons and a daughter.
• David Soul (David Richard Solberg), actor and singer, born 28 August 1943; died 4 January 2024
