San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Obituary: Robert Mandan, actor who played philandering husband on sitcom ‘Soap’
Robert Mandan, a character actor best known for playing the lascivious stockbroker Chester Tate four decades ago on the ABC sitcom “Soap,” has died. He was 86.
His death was confirmed by his publicist, Joseph Williamson, who said Mandan’s family had not released any further information.
Mandan cut an authoritative, blustering figure and was often cast as pompous businessmen like Chester. He was also seen on sitcoms like “All in the Family,” “Sanford and Son” and “Maude,” dramas like “The Doctors” and “Mission: Impossible,” and Broadway shows like “Applause,” which starred Lauren Bacall, before he was cast on “Soap.”
His character Chester’s infidelities were among the more mundane events on “Soap,” a prime-time send-up of daytime soap operas. Its dizzying plot twists included cult brainwashing and demonic possession. Mandan, who had acted on “Search for Tomorrow,” “As the World Turns” and other soaps, played one of the show’s central characters, the patriarch of the wealthy Tate family, from its debut in 1977 until it ended in 1981
Chester, a shameless philanderer whose sheltered wife, Jessica (played by Katherine Helmond), is mired in denial about his assignations, was an exemplar of bad behavior on a show with few virtuous characters. (Among those few was Jodie Dallas, one of the first openly gay characters on network television, played by a young Billy Crystal.)
“Chester is the most immoral of all the ‘Soap’ people,” Mandan told an interviewer in 1977, in an article that noted that studio audiences hissed at his character. “Not only does he go to bed with everybody — but he lies about it, too.”
As the show unfolded, Chester was briefly imprisoned after confessing to a murder but escaped, only then to suffer from amnesia. He regularly traded barbs with his butler, Benson, played by Robert Guillaume, who left the show to star in a spinoff, “Benson.” Jessica eventually caught him fooling around with his receptionist, then had affairs of her own and divorced him in the show’s final season.
After “Soap” ended its run, Mandan returned to guest appearances on television, including a recurring part on “Three’s Company” and its spinoff, “Three’s a Crowd.” He was also seen on “The Love Boat,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and “Who’s the Boss?” and returned to daytime dramas, including “Days of Our Lives” and “General Hospital.”
He had more substantial roles onstage, including a part in the short-lived Broadway musical “Mail” in 1988 and one of the lead roles, the mystery writer Andrew Wyke, in three different West Coast stagings of Anthony Shaffer’s thriller “Sleuth.”
He also appeared in “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” (1982) and a few other films. In 2006, Mandan was a nuanced King Lear in a Los Angeles production directed by the voice coach Patsy Rodenburg. A review in Variety called him “an exemplary Lear.”
Rodenburg told the New York Times in 2006 that Mandan’s background in television comedy had proved an asset for the part.
“A sitcom actor can absolutely understand that there’s a lot of humor in Lear, as well as the savagery of the man and the charisma,” she said.
Mandan was born on Feb. 2, 1932, in Clever, Mo., near Springfield. He studied at Pomona College in Southern California before traveling east to act. He made his Broadway debut as an understudy in the melodrama “Speaking of Murder” in 1956.
Information on survivors was not immediately available.