Richard O’Sullivan has died at the age of 82. He played Robin Tripp, first in Man About the House and then in Robin’s Nest. He died with his close family around him at Brinsworth House, the Royal Variety Charity’s care home, where he had lived for 23 years.

Robin Tripp is the part the obituaries led with. Yet O’Sullivan had been working in front of cameras for two decades before he ever stepped into that flat. He made his screen debut at eight.

A child actor who kept working

O’Sullivan grew up in Chiswick, west London, the son of a garage mechanic called John and his wife, Ellen. He wanted to learn tap-dancing, so as a boy he went to the Corona Stage Academy. His first film was the thriller The Yellow Balloon in 1953, where he played a Sunday school boy.

Within ten years he had played more than 20 film parts. He was Ptolemy in Cleopatra in 1963, with Elizabeth Taylor in the title role. He also appeared with Cliff Richard in The Young Ones in 1961 and Wonderful Life in 1964. On stage in 1956, he joined Peter Hall’s Love’s Labour’s Lost at Stratford.

Plenty of child actors never find adult work. O’Sullivan did, though the Guardian notes that he pumped petrol and drove a minicab between jobs. The part that turned things round was Dr Lawrence Bingham, a prim young doctor in Doctor at Large in 1971 and Doctor in Charge after it.

The flat in Earl’s Court

Man About the House began in 1973. Johnnie Mortimer and Brian Cooke wrote it. Robin was a trainee chef who shared an Earl’s Court flat with two women, Chrissy and Jo, played by Paula Wilcox and Sally Thomsett.

A man living with two single women was a bold idea for the time, the BBC says. The women get round their landlords, George and Mildred Roper, by claiming that Robin is gay. He plays along, and that pretence drove the comedy.

The show ran from 1973 to 1976. It led to a 1974 film and to Three’s Company, an American remake. It also spun off two series of its own, George and Mildred and Robin’s Nest.

Robin’s Nest and a first for British sitcom

Robin’s Nest ran from 1977 to 1981, with Robin now running a bistro. He lived above it with his girlfriend, Vicky, played by Tessa Wyatt. According to the Guardian, it was the first sitcom to show an unmarried couple living together. The IBA, which regulated ITV, vetted the scripts.

Audiences reached 19 million, and the show lasted six series. O’Sullivan wrote its theme tune himself.

Highwayman, then widower

Between 1979 and 1982 he played the title role in ITV’s Dick Turpin. The Guardian calls it casting against type, with the highwayman played as a likeable rogue.

He went back to sitcom in Me and My Girl, from 1984 to 1988. There he played Simon Harrap, an advertising executive raising his teenage daughter alone after his wife’s death. His last sitcom was Trouble in Mind in 1991.

The later years

After that the work thinned out. The BBC lists a spot on Noel’s House Party and a lead in Holed, a 1996 film about a golf match. A stroke in 2003 took him to Brinsworth House, the actors’ retirement home in Twickenham.

His son, James, said his father had been as funny and charming at home as he was on screen. Giles Cooper of the Royal Variety Charity praised his “impeccable comic timing”.

Most of that career, James said, came before he was born. He got to know it through the re-runs.