Designing Women actor Richard Gilliland who married his co-star Jean Smart dead at 71

Designing Women actor Richard Gilliland who married his co-star Jean Smart has died at the age of 71.

The pair were married over 30 years and acted together on stage and screen before his death last week after what a press release called a ‘short illness,’ People reports.

He is survived by his wife as well as the couple’s two children – 31-year-old son Connor and 12-year-old daughter Bonnie Kathleen.

Richard and Jean were in fact meant to co-star in an upcoming Tate Taylor movie called Breaking News In Yuba County that was scheduled to film over he summer.

He was born in Fort Worth, Texas and did theater in school growing up before attending Chicago’s Goodman School Of Drama.

One of his college shows was the 1970s Stephen Schwartz musical Godspell where he played Jesus and a young Joe Mantegna played Judas.

After he left college and the 1970s rolled on Richard became a jobbing actor in television with regular roles on multiple series.

One of them was Operation Petticoat which was an adaptation of a 1950s war movie of the same name starring Cary Grant and Tony Curtis.

The TV show starred Richard in a cast that included Tony’s daughter Jamie Lee Curtis and John Astin whose son Sean Astin starred in The Lord Of The Rings films.

Richard also had a regular role on the short-lived 1970s cop show McMillan & Wife which starred Rock Hudson and played a murderer on Matlock.

He guest starred far and wide on shows like The Love Boat, Fantasy Island and The Waltons but always retained his theatrical discipline.

In an interview with The Sport Of Acting he said that when he got into TV ‘there was a conflict in the sense that I did, I considered myself a very serious actor and I had only done theater and stuff like that.

He dished that ‘I approached the sitcom realm way back when the same way I would’ve approached a play. I prepared. I knew my lines. I was prepared and I was quite shocked when I would find someone who hadn’t done that, you know, that you know, was kinda learning on the fly.’

Richard said that some people ‘didn’t do their homework. I knew how to do homework and I think it was an advantage.’

However he recalled lightly that he took the job so ‘seriously’ that a network executive had to remind him: ‘This isn’t real. It’s television.’

Then in 1986 he landed a recurring role on the sitcom Designing Women as the love interest of one of the leads played by Annie Potts.

Jean laughingly told the Seattle seniors paper North West Prime Time a few years ago: ‘I met him when he was kissing someone else.’

Right at the start Jean had a yen for him and wondered if he was married – so she enlisted her co-star Delta Burke to dig up the information.

‘Naturally, Delta walked up to him and blurted: “Jean wants to know if you’re married,”‘ Jean recalled fondly.

A year later he and Jean tied the knot in a rose garden at the home of Designing Women actress Dixie Carter and her husband Hal Holbrook.

She gave birth to Connor in 1989 and then 20 years later she and Richard adopted Bonnie from China during the little girl’s infancy.

While raising their family Richard acted alongside Jean not only on screen in shows such as 24 but also on the stage where his roots were.

In 2007 they played in Love Letters which is a theater piece about romantic pen pals who start writing to each other in grade school and continue for decades.

Their work together included TV movies like Audrey’s Rain and Just My Imagination as well as the stage piece It Had To Be You.

During his long and happy marriage Richard also kept up solo gigs on programs such as the Canadian series Heartland.

His TV guest gigs continued as well on major shows through the decades, from Thirtysomething to The Practice to Desperate Housewives to Dexter and Scandal. 

Richard’s last completed project was a sci-fi thriller movie called Case 347 that was released just a little over one year ago.