The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
David Soul
Actor who shot to stardom in Starsky and Hutch and topped the charts with Don’t Give Up on Us
DAVID SOUL, who has died aged 80, was best known for his role as the blond, blue-eyed detective Ken Hutchinson in Starsky and Hutch, the American police drama that became a Saturday-night staple of British television in the late 1970s.
Starring opposite Paul Michael Glaser as Starsky, the leather-jacketed, vegetarian and bookish Hutch quickly established himself as a favourite with women. Whether tearing around in their customised red Ford Torino, annoying their long-suffering boss, or exchanging gossip with the streetwise Huggy Bear, Starsky and Hutch brought a complementary insouciance – not to mention a love of chunky knitwear – to the crime-busting escapades that propelled them to the top of the ratings.
But Starsky and Hutch was not just about catching criminals, however laconic and destructive the heroes’ coupling seemed. More than partners, the pair were buddies who stood steadfast together in the face of every challenge, whether from the underworld or the regulation-obsessed bureaucrats of their own department.
The show made Soul a star, a situation he exploited to indulge his lifelong love of music. At the height of his fame, when
5,000 girls greeted him at Heathrow, he turned singer-songwriter and recorded five albums which included the singles Don’t
Give Up on Us, a saccharine ballad which topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, and Silver Lady. But it was his role in Starsky and Hutch that proved definitive.
While Glaser lost his wife and daughter to Aids, Soul battled alcoholism, multiple divorces and second-rate film parts. And eventually, disenchanted with Hollywood, he moved to London.
Despite being typecast in the collective memory as a youthful cop, he carved out a second career on stage, including the title role in the foul-mouthed phenomenon Jerry
Springer: The Opera. He also appeared in such television shows as Holby City and
Little Britain.
Of Swedish descent, David Richard Solberg was born on August 28 1943 in Chicago. His father was a Lutheran pastor who worked in Berlin as a religious affairs adviser for the US High Commission. The family was dedicated to relieving the refugee crisis, and when they returned to South Dakota David had acquired an East German foster sister.
Rebelling against his strict upbringing, the teenage Solberg rejected an invitation to join the Boston Red Sox baseball team and travelled to Mexico with his guitar, girlfriend and infant son.
He returned with his guitar and enrolled at the University of Minnesota, where he sang electric blues in coffee houses and opened for the Byrds and the Lovin’ Spoonful. He also joined the Firehouse Theatre Company in Minneapolis, and when it moved to New York in 1965 he changed his name to Soul and followed it.
He studied with the Actors’ Company and won a musical slot on the Merv Griffin television shows. Performing in a balaclava as “the Covered Man”, so as to be judged on his music rather than his looks, Soul became a fixture on the programme.
But his early years in New York were hard. As a tall, fair, impoverished midwesterner who temporarily became involved with Andy Warhol’s hip hangout for assorted porn stars, drag queens, socialites, drug addicts, musicians and freethinkers known as the Factory – “I was meat for the grinder in that place” – Soul led an existence uncannily akin to Jon Voight’s fictional life in Midnight Cowboy, the John Schlesinger film that was sweeping the country.
Having appeared in several off-Broadway productions, Soul launched his television career in an episode of Star Trek in 1967. After several years cast in secondary roles in routine television serials, he made his big screen debut in Johnny Got His Gun (1971), about a First World War soldier whose disfigurement is so grotesque that he is hidden from his family by the government, who maintain he is dead.
Further walk-ons sustained Soul as he inched his way towards serials that people actually watched. In 1972 he appeared in Marcus Welby MD, The Streets of San Francisco, Ironside and Gunsmoke. The following year he supported Clint Eastwood in Magnum Force, a sequel to the seminal
Dirty Harry. Playing a corrupt motorcycle cop, Soul proved no match for Eastwood’s Harry Callaghan, but he did catch the eye of the producers of Starsky and Hutch.
He remained a familiar small-screen presence over the next couple of years, appearing in Cannon and an entire season in
Owen Marshall, Counsellor at Law. He also played a young prizefighter who teams up with a cynical ex-tap dancer in Dogpound
Shuffle (1974), before the film sank without trace.
But with Starsky and Hutch (1975-79), Soul finally achieved recognition. It was syndicated around the world, and the friendship between the relaxed, urbane
Hutch and the smaller, dark, intense streetfighter Starsky proved instantly and hugely successful. From the moment the Torino screeched into view, the series offered viewers the grit and mayhem of a prime-time Dirty Harry.
Behind the scenes, however, there was conflict. The excessive violence complained of by Glaser was scaled back in the fourth series and the scripts became increasingly tongue-in-cheek. Although Glaser remained unhappy, his disquiet was irrelevant as the producers responded to falling ratings by cancelling a fifth series.
Although the show made Soul famous and financed the building of his mansion in Bel Air, he derived no discernible professional benefit. He played a small-time pimp turned big-city cop in Little Ladies of the Night
(1977), an American adventurer in Britain in the romantic comedy The Stick Up (1977), a vampire hunter in the CBS miniseries of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1979), and a convicted rapist in Rage (1980), a film for which he was Emmy-nominated but which otherwise caused little stir.
Musically, however, he did reap full benefit. David Soul (1976), which showcased his blues-inflected balladry – not to mention his aquamarine eyes and golden locks – lodged at the top of the charts and begat a handful of hit singles. He played to full houses around the world and between 1977 and 1997 released four more albums,
Playing to an Audience of One, A Band of Friends, The Best Days of My Life, and Leave a Light On – by which time his fortunes were fading.
This coincided with – and was precipitated by – a descent into alcoholism that made worldwide headlines when he was arrested for attacking his third wife while she was seven months pregnant. Ordered to undergo therapy, Soul found that his real punishment was ostracism in Hollywood.
He had always been a passionate supporter of causes, and in the mid-1980s financed, produced and directed several documentaries aimed at raising awareness of issues ranging from American Indian land rights to the industrialisation of farming in the American midwest.
The Fighting Ministers (1984) profiled his brother, an activist Lutheran minister, who was jailed while campaigning against the closure of steel works in Pittsburgh. He also directed several episodes of Miami Vice.
He battled on as an actor, appearing in low-grade and made-for-TV fodder, including a television remake of Casablanca
(1983), the Vietnam prison drama The Hanoi
Hilton (1987) and In the Cold of the Night
(1991). Although his career had stalled, he was obliged to accept roles to meet the demands of four divorces and six children.
For although Starsky and Hutch had made him a household name, both he and Glaser had sold their 7.5 per cent share in the series for $100,000 shortly before the worldwide syndication that would have earned them millions.
They were also unimpressed by the film
Starsky and Hutch (2004), in which Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson (as Hutch) parodied their characters. By then Soul had moved to London, a city he had grown to love while performing in Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers in 1996. “I enjoy reading a newspaper and walking on the street, which are things you don’t do in America, because you watch television and drive a car,” he explained.
Committing himself to the British stage, he appeared in the West End in The Aspern
David Mamet’s Speed the Plow and Alan Ayckbourn’s Comic Potential. He also directed Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love at Edinburgh, a production noted for its ingenious streaming of media. In 2004 he took over from Michael Brandon in Jerry
playing the title (and only non-singing) role. That year, he took British citizenship, saying: “My home is where my art is.”
Soul was a keen skier and tennis player, despite being a heroic smoker who, when asked how many he smoked a day, replied: “As many as I can fit in.” He fought for lost causes, immersed himself in his north London neighbourhood, supported group counselling sessions and became a keen fan of Arsenal.
Impressed by the journalist Martin Bell, having heard him on the radio, he offered to support Bell’s 1997 attempt to oust the incumbent, sleaze-tainted Tatton Tory MP, Neil Hamilton. Voters were surprised and delighted in equal measure to find themselves canvassed by television’s Hutch.
David Soul married Miriam Russeth (1964-65); Karen Carlson (1968-77); Patti Sherman (1980-86); Julia Nickson (1987-93); and, in 2010, Helen Snell, who survives him. He had one child each by his first, second and fourth marriages, and three by his third. He once observed he had “married and divorced my wives and then become friends with them. Which is probably the wrong way round.”
David Soul, born August 28 1943, died January 4 2024