Martin Mull, veteran American comedian and actor in ‘arrested development’ and ‘Roseanne’ has died, his daughter announced on Friday.
Mull’s daughter, TV writer and comic artist Maggie Mull, said her father died at home on Thursday after “a battle with a long illness.”
“He was known for excelling at every creative discipline imaginable and also for doing Red Roof Inn commercials,” Maggie Mull said in an Instagram post.
“He would find that joke funny. He was never not funny. My dad will be deeply missed by his wife and daughter, by his friends and coworkers, by fellow artists and comedians and musicians, and—the sign of a truly exceptional person—by many, many dogs.”
Mull was born in Chicago, raised in Ohio and Connecticut and studied art in Rhode Island and Rome. He entered show business in the 1970s.
“In 1976 I was a guitar player and sit-down comic appearing at the Roxy on the Sunset Strip when Norman Lear walked in and heard me,” Mull told The Associated Press in 1980.
“He cast me as the wife beater on ‘Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.’ Four months later I was spun off on my own show.”
In the 1990s he was best known for his recurring role on several seasons on “Roseanne,” in which he played a warmer boss to the title character, an openly gay man whose partner was played by Willard, who died in 2020.
Mull would later play private eye Gene Parmesan on “Arrested Development,” a cult-classic character on a cult-classic show, and would be nominated for an Emmy, his first, in 2016 for a guest run on “Veep.”
“What I did on ‘Veep’ I’m very proud of, but I’d like to think it’s probably more collective, at my age it’s more collective,” Mull told the AP after his nomination.
Mull is survived by his daughter and musician Wendy Haas, his wife since 1982.
