Martin Mull, the Painter Who Funded His Canvases Playing a Square Who Thought He Was Hip

Martin Mull

Photo: Life, Love, and Pop-Culture/ Danielle Delgado / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 18, 1943 Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Died	June 27, 2024 (80)
Occupation	Actor, comedian and painter
Known for	Mrs. Doubtfire, Clue, The Player

Martin Mull spent his working life being mistaken for the thing he did to pay the bills. Television knew him as the smirking host in the lime sharkskin suit, the colonel with a secret in Clue, the boss who hired Roseanne Conner, the private detective whose disguises fooled only Lucille Bluth. He thought of himself as a painter. The comedy, he once told Terry Gross on Fresh Air, paid “for almost all of the paint,” and he added that the line was truer than it sounded.

The split opened early. Mull was born in Chicago, the son of Betty Mull, an actress and director, and Harold Mull, an acoustics engineer, and he grew up first in North Ridgeville, a small farming town west of Cleveland, then in New Canaan, Connecticut, where the family moved when he was fifteen. At the Rhode Island School of Design, the questions that had made him an outsider became, as he put it, “not only acceptable but necessary.” His verdict on the place was blunt: “To say that art school changed my life would be a vast understatement. It created it.”

He took a bachelor’s degree in painting at RISD in 1965 and a master’s in 1967, then found there was no further degree to chase. So he played guitar for a living. He wrote Jane Morgan’s 1970 country single “A Girl Named Johnny Cash,” made his own records for Capricorn from 1972 with Levon Helm among the sidemen, and scraped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1973 with the novelty “Dueling Tubas.” He dressed the stage with thrift-store sofas and lamps, a set-up that gave his act its name, Martin Mull and His Fabulous Furniture, and opened for Frank Zappa and Bruce Springsteen. “I’m a dreadful singer,” he said, “so that led to talking a lot.”

The talking took him to Los Angeles after a divorce, carrying “a couple of guitars and a suitcase.” Turned down for a writing job on Norman Lear’s Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, he was called back six months later to read for Garth Gimble, a man who beat his wife, and he got the part in 1976. He found “nothing whatsoever amusing about wife abuse,” and after one scene he had to go for “a very, very long walk.” Garth died impaled on an aluminum Christmas tree, but Lear liked Mull enough to build Fernwood 2 Night around Garth’s twin brother, Barth, host of a hopeless small-town talk show, with Fred Willard as his sidekick, Jerry Hubbard. A year later it went national as America 2-Night. Mull said he modeled Barth on local broadcasters who were “underequipped and overachieving,” and summed up the partnership with Willard this way: “between the two of us, we basically set television back a quantum leap.” It was never a hit, but NPR critic David Bianculli argued it took the talk show apart years before David Letterman did.

Film followed. He made his debut as a neurotic disc jockey in FM in 1978, carried a rare lead in the Marin County satire Serial in 1980, and then settled into the supporting roles that defined him: the wife’s predatory boss in Mr. Mom, Colonel Mustard in Clue, a small part in Mrs. Doubtfire. In 1985 he co-created the mockumentary The History of White People in America, which the Associated Press later described as what many considered his best work.

From 1991 to 1997 he played Leon Carp on Roseanne, Roseanne’s fussy, openly gay boss and later her business partner, on one of the most-watched comedies in the United States. In “December Bride,” broadcast in December 1995, Leon married his partner Scott, and the groom was played by Fred Willard, reuniting the Fernwood team at the altar.

The record has a harder side. After Serial, leading roles mostly went elsewhere. Domestic Life, the CBS sitcom he created and starred in, lasted ten episodes in 1984, and Rented Lips, which he wrote and produced in 1988, did little to change that. Mull himself raised the Leon question in 1995, telling Gross he had expected “a lot of heat” for being “a straight guy” cast in the part; the role was praised at the time, but the same casting would be argued over today. And the art world never quite resolved whether it was looking at a painter or at a famous man who painted. His most loyal buyers were show-business friends: Steve Martin acquired about nineteen of his works, and Norman Lear bought others.

The paintings themselves were not a hobby. In 1980 a UCLA doctor phoned to tell him he had terminal melanoma and two years to live; his dermatologist, it turned out, had already removed all of it. “Painting became the most important thing in my life at that point,” he said, because “it was probably the truest thing to me.” That year he held his first serious solo exhibition, at the Molly Barnes Gallery in Los Angeles, which the painter Mark Kostabi later credited with helping launch his own career. Mull’s canvases mixed photorealist technique with pop art and collage. He published Paintings, Drawings and Words in 1995. One of his paintings became the cover of Joyce Carol Oates’s novel My Sister, My Love, and After Dinner Drinks, owned by Steve Martin, became the cover of Love Has Come for You, Martin’s album with Edie Brickell. In 1982 he married the singer Wendy Haas, and the two had a daughter, Maggie Mull, who became a television writer.

Television kept calling. He was the vice-principal Willard Kraft on Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the voice of the villain Vlad Masters in Danny Phantom, and Gene Parmesan, the detective of preposterous disguises, in Arrested Development, from 2004 through its Netflix revival. He played a drug-dealing pharmacist on Two and a Half Men, and in 2016 his turn as Bob Bradley in Veep earned him a Primetime Emmy nomination at 72. His last series role came on The Afterparty in 2023. He died at home in Los Angeles on June 27, 2024, aged 80 (he was born on August 18, 1943), after what his daughter called “a valiant fight against a long illness.”

On October 7, 2026, Netflix released Who Is Martin Mull?, a documentary that Bob Saget began, interviewing Mull face to face, before his own death in 2022, and that Neil Berkeley finished as co-director. Steve Martin, Tom Waits, David Alan Grier and the late Fred Willard appear in it. The title poses the question his career never answered on screen; the canvases answer it better: the man who spent decades playing a square convinced he was hip was, by his own account, a painter first.

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Tags: actors, Roseanne, Arrested Development, Martin Mull, Steve Martin, Who Is Martin Mull?, Clue

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