‘I Spy’ co-star Culp dies
Actor known for breakthrough series with Bill Cosby
LOS ANGELES – Robert Culp, the veteran actor best known for starring with Bill Cosby in the classic 1960s espionage-adventure series “I Spy” and for playing Bob in the 1969 movie “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” died Wednesday. He was 79.
Culp fell and hit his head while taking a walk outside his Hollywood Hills home. He was found by a jogger who called 911 and was pronounced dead at Hollywood-Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles.
“My mind wants to flow into sadness, but I want to stay above that,” Cosby told the Los Angeles Times Wednesday.
Longtime friend Hugh Hefner, who was introduced to Culp by Cosby in the ’60s, said he was “absolutely stunned” by the actor’s death.
“He was one of my best friends,” Hefner said.
Culp was a regular at a weekly gathering of friends at the Playboy Mansion.
“He was very much like he appeared to be,” said Hefner. “He’s the one who came up with the tongue-in-cheek motto for when the guys got together: ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, be of good cheer, for they are out there and we are in here.’ ”
In a six-decade career in which he was best known for his work on television, Culp first came to fame as the star of the TV Western “Trackdown,” which ran on CBS from 1957 to 1959.
He later played FBI agent Bill Maxwell on the 1981-83 ABC series “The Greatest American Hero.”
But for TV fans of a certain age, Culp is best remembered for “I Spy.”
The hour-long series, which ran from 1965 to 1968 and was billed as an “adventure-comedy” by NBC, starred Culp as Kelly Robinson and Cosby as Alexander Scott: American secret agents whose cover was that Kelly was a globe-trotting top-seeded tennis player and Scott was his trainer.
The series, which was filmed on location around the world, made history as the first American weekly dramatic series with a black performer in a starring role.
Culp received three consecutive Emmy nominations for his role in “I Spy” and was beat out each time by Cosby.
But Culp, who also received an Emmy nomination for a script he wrote for the series, said he wasn’t jealous over Cosby’s wins.
“No,” he told the Washington Post in 1977, “I was the proudest man around.”