The actor Richard O’Sullivan has died at the age of 82, prompting a look back at a career that ran from precocious child star to one of British sitcom’s most beloved leading men. He began acting almost by chance, after being sent to the Corona Theatre School to soften an Irish accent picked up on a family holiday, and went on to appear in major films as a child, including alongside Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s Story and Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra, before successfully making the difficult transition to adult roles.

He found lasting fame in the 1970s playing Robin Tripp, a trainee chef who moves in with two women in Man About the House, a role built on a then-novel, faintly feminist premise that nonetheless made him a quietly radical “new man” heart-throb. The spin-off Robin’s Nest saw him in one of British television’s first unmarried cohabiting on-screen relationships, and he later took the title role in Dick Turpin, cementing his status as a versatile and widely adored leading man; he also published cookery books and fronted adverts, trading on his image as a charming man who could cook.