Actor Patrick Muldoon, known for the film Starship Troopers and the series Melrose Place where he played the villain Richard Hart, passed away this Sunday at 57 years old from a heart attack, according to the American media outlet Deadline Hollywood.
“Infinitely generous, with his poetry, his humor and his unmistakable presence, he loved animals and people equally, gave unforgettable hugs and had the rare quality of making others feel safe and valued,” a friend of Muldoon told the media, adding that the actor, best known in the US for the long-running daily series Days of Our Lives, was “elegant, charismatic, full of life and faced each day with a rock-and-roll spirit that lived life to the fullest.”
Born on September 27, 1968, in San Pedro, California, Muldoon began his acting career while studying at the University of Southern California. During that period, he appeared in two episodes of Who’s the Boss?, a 1984 sitcom centered on a former baseball player who starts working as a housekeeper for a successful executive. Shortly after graduating in 1991, Muldoon participated in three episodes of Saved by the Bell, a youth comedy where he played Jeffrey Hunter.
His first big role came with Days of Our Lives, a veteran American soap opera in which he played Austin Reed in almost 500 episodes during two different periods, the first between 1992 and 1995 and then between 2011 and 2012. In the nineties, Muldoon gained even more popularity with Melrose Place, an ensemble series where he played the manipulative Richard Hart between the third and fifth seasons in a total of 35 episodes.
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On the big screen, one of Muldoon’s most remembered roles was that of Zander Barcalow in Starship Troopers (1997), the military science fiction film, a critique of this type of cinema and warmongering in the real world directed by Paul Verhoeven, in which he played the ambitious Fleet pilot and romantic rival of Johnny Rico.
In parallel, he maintained a constant presence in TV movies in the late nineties and much of the 2000s such as Bad Luck (1998), Final Descent (2000), Project Viper (2002), A Boyfriend for Christmas (2004) or Spiders (2007). His last acting work, the criminal thriller Dirty Hands, will premiere in the United States in 2026.
To that facet as an actor, he added a constant career as an executive producer in titles such as The Last Word (2017), Arkansas (2020), Marlowe (2022), by Neil Jordan, The Card Counter (2021), by Paul Schrader, Riff Raff (2024), the upcoming The Dreadful (2026) and Kockroach, a feature film starring Chris Hemsworth, Taron Egerton and Zazie Beetz whose filming began in April 2026 in Australia.
