Richard Moll was bailiff on `Night Court'

Richard Moll, the 6-foot-8 actor who delighted television audiences with a childlike charm in his role as the hulking bailiff on the NBC sitcom “Night Court,” died Thursday at his home in Big Bear Lake. He was 80. His death was announced by a family spokesperson, Jeff Sanderson. No cause was given.

In a career of more than four decades, Moll played a variety of roles on television and in films. But he was best known for portraying the baldheaded, wideeyed Aristotle Nostradamus Shannon, better known as Bull, on all nine seasons of “Night Court,” which ran from 1984 to 1992.

Bull Shannon's dimwitted persona lent an air of lighthearted innocence to the series, which was set inside a fictional municipal night court in New York City. It starred Harry Anderson, who died in 2018, as Judge Harry Stone, and John Larroquette as prosecutor Dan Fielding. (A rebooted “Night Court” made its debut on NBC this year, with Larroquette the only actor returning from the original series.)

Moll was “larger than life and taller too,” Larroquette said Friday in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Richard Charles Moll was born on Jan. 13, 1943, in Pasadena to Harry and Violet Moll. He graduated with a degree in history from UC Berkeley, in 1964.

“Probably auditioning for `Night Court' would be my first big break,” Moll said in a 2010 interview with MaximoTV.

He recalled that he had been asked if he was willing to shave his head for the part.

“I said, `Are you kidding?'” he said. “`I'll shave my legs for the part. I'll shave my armpits. I don't care.' ”

After “Night Court” ended, Moll did cartoon voice-over work, including roles as Two-Face, a disturbed villain with a disfigured mug, on the Fox Kids show “Batman: The Animated Series” and as Scorpion, one of the hero's many adversaries on “Spider-Man: The Animated Series,” on the same network.