Robert Culp

Robert Culp spent fifty years playing men who were certain they were the smartest person in the room, and the interesting part is how often they were. He arrived on television in 1957 as Texas Ranger Hoby Gilman in Trackdown, seventy-one episodes of it across two years, and followed with Tate, Cain's Hundred and a run of anthology work that includes Trent in The Outer Limits, still one of the best-remembered hours that series ever produced.

I Spy changed things. From 1965 to 1968 he and Bill Cosby played American agents travelling under cover as a tennis player and his trainer, and the show's real innovation was that the two men talked to each other like friends instead of delivering plot at each other. Culp was a screenwriter as well as an actor, and I Spy has a looseness in its dialogue that scripted 1960s television very rarely allowed.

Film gave him one great part. Bob Sanders in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice in 1969 is a documentary maker who comes back from a retreat with a new philosophy and sets about talking two friends into it, and Culp plays the evangelism and the self-satisfaction as one single thing.

The later career was character work and he was very good at it: Bill Maxwell, the permanently exasperated FBI agent in The Greatest American Hero, Warren Whelan on Everybody Loves Raymond, the President in The Pelican Brief, Halcyon Renard in Gargoyles, and voice work in video games including Half-Life 2. He died in 2010.