Martin Mull, the comedic actor best known for his roles in “Clue,” “Roseanne,” “Arrested Development” and “Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” died Thursday. He was 80.

His daughter, TV writer and producer Maggie Mull, shared the news on Instagram.

“He was known for excelling at every creative discipline imaginable and also for doing Red Roof Inn commercials,” she wrote. “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, who was also a singer-songwriter, rose to fame in the 1970s on Norman Lear’s satirical soap opera “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” and its spinoffs, “Fernwood 2 Night” and “America 2-Night.”

The dry-witted comic played Colonel Mustard in the 1985 comedy “Clue” and Teri Garr’s boss in 1983’s “Mr. Mom.” He was Roseanne’s boss, Leon Carp, on her titular sitcom, private detective Gene Parmesan on “Arrested Development” and “Sabrina the Teenage Witch’s” nosy Principal Kraft, in addition to voicing characters on animated shows, including “American Dad!” and “The Simpsons.”

The actor appeared in more than 200 Los Angeles Times articles across four decades. most recently in December. Following the death of Lear, a Times roundup of seven essential Lear shows noted Mull’s contributions to the oddball gallery of characters in “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.”

Here’s a sampling of headlines from Mull’s life as actor and as painter. A full Times appreciation is forthcoming.

When Anne (Léa Drucker) has sex with her 17-year-old stepson, she closes and sometimes covers her eyes. It’s a pose that brings to mind what people say about the tradition of draping a napkin over your head before eating ortolan, that the idea is to prevent God from witnessing what you’re about to do. Théo (Samuel Kircher) is as fine-boned as any songbird — “You’re so slim!” Anne gasps in what sounds almost like pain during one of their encounters, as she runs her hands up his rangy torso — and just as forbidden. And despite the fact that what she’s doing could blow up her life, she can’t stay away. It wouldn’t be fair to say that desire is a form of madness in Last Summer, a family drama as masterfully propulsive as a horror movie. Anne remains upsettingly clear-eyed about what’s happening, as though to suggest otherwise would be a cop-out. But desire is powerful, enough to compel this bourgeois middle-age professional into betraying everything she stands for in a few breathtaking turns.

Last Summer is the first film in a decade from director Catherine Breillat, the taboo-loving legend behind the likes of Fat Girl and Romance. Last Summer, which Breillat and co-writer Pascal Bonitzer adapted from the 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts, could be described as tame only in comparison to Rocco Siffredi drinking a teacup full of tampon water in Anatomy of Hell, but there is a lulling sleekness to the way it lays out its setting that turns out to be deceptive. Anne and her husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) live with their two adopted daughters in a handsome house surrounded by sun-dappled countryside, a lifestyle sustained by the business dealings that frequently require Pierre to travel. Anne’s sister and closest friend Mina (Clotilde Courau) works as a manicurist in town, and conversations between the two make it clear that they didn’t grow up in the kind of ease Anne currently enjoys. It’s a luxury that allows her to pursue a career that seems more driven by idealism than by financial concerns. Anne is a lawyer who represents survivors of sexual assault, a detail that isn’t ironic, exactly, so much as it represents just how much individual actions can be divorced from broader beliefs.

In the opening scene, Anne dispassionately questions an underage client about her sexual history. She informs the girl that she should expect the defense to paint her as promiscuous before reassuring her that judges are accustomed to this tactic. The sequence outlines how familiar Anne is with the narratives used to discredit accusers, but also highlights a certain flintiness to her character. Drucker’s performance is impressively hard-edged even before Anne ends up in bed with her stepson. There’s a restlessness to the character behind the sleek blonde hair and businesswoman shifts, a desire to think of herself as unlike other women and as more interesting than the buttoned-up normies her husband brings by for dinner. Anne enjoys her well-coiffed life, but she also feels impatient with it, and when Théo gets dropped into her lap after being expelled from school in Geneva for punching his teacher, he triggers something in her that’s not just about lust. Théo is still very much a kid, something Breillat emphasizes by showcasing the messes he leaves around the house as much as on his sulky, half-formed beauty. But that rebelliousness speaks to Anne, who finds something invigorating in aligning herself with callow passion and impulsiveness instead of stultifying adulthood — however temporarily.

This being a Breillat film, the sex is Last Summer’s proving ground, the place where all those tensions about gender and class and age meet up with the inexorability of the flesh. The first time Anne sleeps with Théo, it’s shot from below, as though the camera’s lying in bed beside the woman as she looks up at the boy on top of her. It’s a point of view that makes the audience complicit in the scene, but that also dares you not to find its spectacle hot. Breillat is an avid button-pusher responsible for some of the more disturbing depictions of sexuality to have ever been committed to screen, but Last Summer refuses to defang its main character by portraying her simply as a predatory molester. Instead, she’s something more complicated — a woman trying to have things both ways, to dabble in the transgressive without risking her advantageous perch in the mainstream, and to wield the weapons of the victim-blaming society she otherwise battles when they are to her advantage. It’s not the sex that harms Théo; it’s the mindfuck of what he’s subjected to. After dreamily playing tourist in Théo’s youthful existence, Anne drags him into the brutal realities of the grown-up world. The results are unflinching and breathtakingly ugly. You couldn’t be blamed for wanting to look away.

The art of conversation has been a casualty in these deeply divided days of ours, and the poor state of talk in the movies — so often expositional, glib or posturing — is an unfortunate reflection of that. The new film “Daddio” is an attempt to put verbal discourse front and center, confining to a yellow taxi a pair with different life paths, as you would expect when your leads are Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson. (Guess which one is the cabbie.)

Johnson’s coolly elegant, nameless traveler, a computer programmer returning to New York’s JFK airport from a trip visiting a big sister in Oklahoma, may be getting a flat rate for her journey, but the meter’s always running on the mouth of Penn’s gleefully crusty and opinionated driver, Clark. He’s a twice-married man prone to streetwise philosophizing about the state of the world and, over the course of the ride, the unsettled romances of his attractive fare. And as she drops clues about her life — sometimes unwittingly, then a little more freely — she gives back with some probing responses of her own, trying to pry him open.

Writer-director Christy Hall, who originally conceived the scenario as a stage play, lets the chatter roll — there’s a significant stretch in which the cab isn’t even moving. And when silence sets in, there’s still an exchange to tend to, as Johnson occasionally, with apprehension, responds to a lover’s insistent sexting. This third figure (unseen, save one predictable picture sent to her phone) becomes another source of conjectural bravado for Clark, a self-proclaimed expert in male-female relations, who makes eye contact through the rearview mirror.

Watching the unremarkable “Daddio,” you’ll never worry that anything untoward or combustible will happen between the chauvinist driver with a heart of gold and the smart if vulnerable young female passenger who “can handle herself,” as Clark frequently observes. That lack of tension is the problem. The movie is less about a nuanced conversation between strangers than a writer’s careful construction, designed to bridge a cultural impasse between the sexes. Hall is so eager to stage a big moment that upends expectations and triggers wet-eyed epiphanies — He’s a compassionate blowhard! She can laugh at his crassness! — that we’re never allowed to feel the molecules shift from moment to moment in a way that isn’t unforced. Life may be the subject, but life is what’s missing.

It doesn’t help that in directing her first feature, Hall has given herself one of the hardest jobs, getting the most out of only two ingredients and one container. It’s probably why Jim Jarmusch went the variety route with five different tales for his memorable 1991 taxi suite “Night on Earth.” That film conveyed a palpable sense of time and space.

“Daddio,” on the other hand, is nowhere near as assured visually or in its pacing. Hall has an experienced cinematographer in Phedon Papamichael (“Nebraska,” “Ford v Ferrari”) but chooses an unfortunate studio gloss that suggests utter control, rather than a what-might-happen vibe. Not that there’s anything wrong with a movie so clearly made on a set. But Johnson’s well-rehearsed poise and Penn’s coasting boldness make them seem like the stars of a commercial for a scent called Common Ground rather than flesh-and-blood people. At times, they hardly seem to be sharing the same car interior, leaving “Daddio” feeling like a safe space, when what it needs is danger.