Richard B. Shull, an actor whose Walter Matthau-like face was familiar from television and film and who was portraying D.W. DeWitt in the current Broadway production of Epic Proportions, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 70.
His wife, Deborah Thomas Shull, said the cause was a heart attack.
Mr. Shull was perhaps best known for his television performances as Alex Holmes on Holmes and Yoyo, Lieutenant Gillis on Hart to Hart, Jack Towne on Lou Grant and Diana Rigg’s co-star on her show Diana.
Epic Proportions, a comedy that opened Sept. 30 to mixed reviews, marked Mr. Shull’s third play under the director Jerry Zaks. The others were The Marriage of Bette and Boo at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, for which he received an Obie Award in 1985, and The Front Page at Lincoln Center Theater in 1986. A spokesman for Epic Proportions, Bill Coyle, said Mr. Shull’s role will be filled by his understudy, Larry Cahn, until further notice.
In his review of The Front Page in The New York Times, Frank Rich — who once described Mr. Shull as “that amusing character actor who looks like a bloated fish” — singled out the performer for praise. “Richard B. Shull, forever wincing as if life were one long embarrassing encounter with a whoopee cushion, plays the incompetent sheriff ‘Pinky’ as the exact kind of backroom ‘moron’ that he’s called — moronic enough to permit a jailbreak but not so stupid that he neglects to hire his relatives at city expense for the search party,” Rich wrote.
Last season, Mr. Shull portrayed Dr. Migraine in Bill Irwin’s A Flea in Her Ear at the Roundabout Theater. The actor also appeared in Minnie’s Boys in 1970; Goodtime Charley, for which he received a Tony award nomination in 1975; Oh, Brother! in 1981; Ain’t Broadway Grand in 1993 and Victor/Victoria in the mid-1990s.
He has been described as the bright spot in films like Private Parts, Housesitter and Splash. He also appears in the upcoming independent feature Two Family House. In reviewing Unfaithfully Yours for The New York Times in 1984, Vincent Canby said Mr. Shull “would be completely at home in an authentic Sturges comedy.”
Mr. Shull’s marriages to Margaret Ann Haddy and Peggy J. Barringer ended in divorce. His third wife, Marilyn S. Swartz, died in 1997. Besides his wife, there are no survivors.
