Michael O'Sullivan (actor)

Michael O'Sullivan (March 4, 1934 – July 24, 1971) was an American actor, "larger than life," who appeared on Broadway, at Lincoln Center, on the London stage, at San Francisco's Actor's Workshop and in many regional theaters and festivals of America throughout his brief career in the late 1950s and '60s.

Clive Barnes of the New York Times designated O'Sullivan as "one of America's best young actors." Raised in Phoenix, AZ, O'Sullivan studied and acted at the University of Denver and the Goodman Memorial Theater in Chicago, then played major roles (including a remarkable "prancing" Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida) at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1957 and 1958. He was one of a ten actor corps hired by the San Francisco Actor's Workshop under a 1960 Ford Foundation grant to the company, and he came to national prominence with his portrayal of the title role in the Workshop's 1961 King Lear as a "preening, deranged, screeching Lear, imbued with primordial divinity," under Herbert Blau's direction. In 1963 he won the Obie and the Laura D'Annunzio Awards for his portrayal of the Director in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, directed by William Ball, a role he also performed in London, and in 1965 he performed the title role in Ball's staging of Molière's Tartuffe for the new Repertory Company of Lincoln Center, prompting critic Howard Taubman to praise O'Sullivan for showing "how a Molière performance can be larger than life, and not out of focus... [moving] between cringing, shuffling humility and outrageous arrogance."

O'Sullivan was a nominee for the Tony award in 1966 for his role as the villain Sedgwick in the Broadway musical, It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman. His last New York appearance was in 1969 in Georges Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear with the American Conservatory Theater at the ANTA Theater, and Clive Barnes said of that performance, "zany... galvanic lunacy... this is great farce acting."

In July 1971, Michael O'Sullivan was found dead in his San Francisco apartment at the age of 37, a bottle of sleeping pills by his side. It is not known whether his death was accidental or a suicide.

(He appeared "in Shakespeare in San Diego")

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