Actor played tough crime-fighter with an emotional core
David Soul, the doleful-eyed actor and singer who rose to fame portraying one half of a cagey crime-fighting duo on the hit 1970s television show Starsky & Hutch and scored a No. 1 hit single in 1977 with “Don’t Give Up On Us,” died Thursday. He was 80.
His death was confirmed in a statement by his wife, Helen Snell, who did not specify a cause or say where he died. He had been living in Britain since 1995 and became a British citizen in 2004.
Snell’s statement said “David Soul — beloved husband, father, grandfather and brother — died yesterday after a valiant battle for life in the loving company of family.”
“He shared many extraordinary gifts in the world as actor, singer, storyteller, creative artist and dear friend,” the statement said. “His smile, laughter and passion for life will be remembered by the many whose lives he has touched.”
Soul first gained national fame in the 1960s appearing on The Merv Griffin Show as “The Covered Man,” a singer disguised in a stocking cap who shouted out lyrics like “That is why I hide my face, because a man has to be free.”
A Chicago-born son of a Lutheran minister, Soul had spent nearly a decade appearing on television shows like Star Trek
and The Streets of San Francisco
before he won his career-defining role as detective Ken “Hutch” Hutchinson on Starsky & Hutch,
which was broadcast on ABC. It made him a regular presence in American living rooms, as well as a recognized heartthrob, from 1975 to 1979.
Soul played the coolheaded Midwestern sidekick to detective Dave Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser), a savvy Brooklynite. The two tooled around Southern California’s fictional Bay City in a red Ford Gran Torino emblazoned with a giant, Nike-esque swoosh on each side while cracking cases with the help of their streetwise informant, Huggy Bear (Antonio Fargas).
Soul had first caught the eye of the show’s creators with an icy performance as a vigilante motorcycle cop in Magnum Force
(1973), the first of several sequels to the 1971 Clint Eastwood film Dirty Harry.
He initially had misgivings
about the Hutch character, seeing him as nothing more than “bland white-bread,” Soul said in the 2004 television documentary He’s Starsky, I’m Hutch.
“I didn’t like him,” he said. “I wanted to play Starsky.”
Even as old-school tough
guys with badges, Starsky and Hutch stood out on the 1970s cop show landscape by sharing an on-screen emotional intimacy that was striking for its day.
Glaser later said their relationship had homoerotic overtones.
As Soul said in the documentary, “One of the things that Starsky & Hutch did do was, it made it OK for two men to show their feelings about each other, which we shouldn’t be ashamed of.”
His other TV credits included appearances on All in the Family and I Dream of Jeannie, the miniseries Salem’s Lot and a short-lived version of the film classic Casablanca, in which Soul took on Humphrey Bogart’s role as nightclub owner Rick Blaine.
Soul’s movies included Magnum Force, The Hanoi Hilton and a cameo with Glaser in the 2004 big-screen remake of Starsky & Hutch starring Ben Stiller as Starsky and Owen Wilson as Hutch.
After releasing his debut album in 1976, he shot to the top of the U.S. charts the next year with the lachrymose ballad “Don’t Give Up On Us.”
Wilson memorably parodied the song in the feature film, which also starred Snoop Dogg as Huggy Bear.