I knew him best from Greatest American Hero.
RIP
Robert Culp was always Hoby Gilman of Trackdown for me. Even in I Spy, Cosby would occasionally call him Hoby or even Hobe. He and Steve McQueen were the cool cowboys against others like Johnny Yuma and The Rifleman in that 50’s and 60’s heyday of TV Westerns.
There’s a great interview with him on YouTube that would fill in whatever gaps you may have about his career.
His teaching Raquel to shoot is another fond memory.
He and Bill Cosby were terrific together in I Spy. He was also in the great Outer Limits’ episode *Demon With A Glass Hand *.
Same here.
Here’s the YouTube interview – right at three hours worth.
I saw him in all the forementioned as well as in Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice.
“I Spy” is what I remember him from. He and Cosby were great together.
He was awesome in Columbo, where his signature schtick worked perfectly: no less than three times he was the go-to guy for being self-assured to the point of just plain sounding tired when oh-so-patiently explaining that no actual evidence links him to any of this crap and can we please just get back to the serious business of, y’know, running a business?
You want a sympathetic killer, or one who’s smugly condescending? Another actor will do fine. You want a matter-of-fact guy who only gets halfway to exasperated when pointing out stuff he feels already got covered to his satisfaction? Yeah, that’s Robert Culp.
Yep, to me he was always Bill Maxwell, running a scenario. RIP, Bill.
And he was a damned fine tennis player in real life.
He was the kind of actor that when he smiled good-naturedly, you wanted to smile good-naturedly too. And that’s saying something.
There was this thing that he and Cosby worked out early on in I Spy and it could just as easily have been one as the other of them, but it went something like “the wonderfulness of yourself” which they would toss around among other private ad-lib stuff. I use that from time to time since it’s just too cool an expression.
Also, I just remembered that I served him at a restraunt years ago, he was charming, pleasant and a good tipper!
When I heard the news my first thought was “Robert Culp is still alive?”
I was introduced to him on Greatest American Hero but later on saw a lot of his other work. Rest in peace Mr. Culp!
This is how I best remember Culp–the man who committed more murders on “Columbo” than anybody except Jack Cassidy. I plan to pay tribute to him with a Columbo-fest featuring his episodes this weekend.
At the risk of showing my geekhood, my most recent memories of Culp involve his work on Half-Life 2. He was chilling there – went from avuncular/affable to megalomaniacal and sadistic. Part of a terrific cast all-round.
That’s where I remembered him from, although I’m not sure which episode having seen his multiple appearance listed on IMDB.
Wasn’t he rumored to replace Larry Hagman as JR Ewing when Hagman had his contract dispute?