On Jan 4, 2024, ‘70s detective show fans were heartbroken to learn about the passing of David Soul, the Hutch half of Starsky & Hutch.
Time is unforgiving. Despite being a chart-topping musician and one of the biggest television stars of his day, Soul had fallen out of the public eye in his later years – so much so that the details of his personal life had become a matter of speculation.
David Soul’s net worth? It’s complicated
The state of his finances were a guessing game, even to the folks at Celebrity Net Worth, who pride themselves on their ability to divine the contents of the wallets of people from TV. They put Soul’s personal holdings at a suspiciously even $1 million, and they do it without citing sources, means of income, or specific pay rates for projects throughout the performer’s life.
For Soul’s part, he spoke openly about the missed opportunities that cost him money. He publicly recalled having sold his 7.5% stake in the Starsky & Hutch franchise for roughly the equivalent of $100,000 in contemporary figures. This meant missing out on cash from the show’s 2004 reboot, as well as the gender-swapped television reimagining that’s currently in the works.
And while we don’t know what David Soul’s income was like in the years leading up to his death, we can presume that he had some expenses. The Magnum Force actor had been married five times, including a particularly acrimonious marriage to Patti Carnell Sherman. He was arrested in 1983 for beating her while she was pregnant with the couple’s child, and ordered to attend one of what would soon become multiple stints in rehab.
His struggles with chemical dependency didn’t end there, either. A three-pack-a-day smoker until the last ten years of his life, he had to have a lung removed, underwent a voice-altering tracheostomy, and battled COPD until his death. These issues would have further whittled down the performer’s already slim options for accepting work late in life.
While Soul was a member of one of the last generations of actors to really benefit from the syndication of their work, major medical and legal problems in the face of an inability to find work will put a dent in anyone’s nest egg — even with the assistance that the expat received from Britain’s NHS, which he described as “just the best.” His finances were as chaotic as they were opaque. In short, concrete answers to the question “What was David Soul’s net worth” are hard to come by.
