Tom Bosley, whose long acting career was highlighted by his hugely popular role as the understanding father on television’s nostalgic, top-rated 1970s comedy series Happy Days, died aged 83.

Mr Bosley died of heart failure at a hospital near his Palm Springs home.

His agent, Sheryl Abrams, said he was also battling lung cancer.

The show debuted in 1974 and ran for 11 seasons.

When he was first offered the co-starring role in Happy Days, a series about teenage life in the 1950s, he turned it down.

“After re-reading the pilot script,” he recalled in a 1986 interview, “I changed my mind because of a scene between Howard Cunningham and Richie. The father/son situation was written so movingly, I fell in love with the project.”

Propelled by America’s nostalgia for the simple pleasures of the 1950s, Happy Days, which debuted in 1974, slowly built to hit status, becoming television’s top-rated series by its third season.

It made a star of Henry Winkler, who played hip-talking, motorcycle-riding hoodlum Arthur Fonzi Fonzarelli.

His image initially clashed with that of Richie and his “straight” friends. But over the show’s 11-season run Fonzarelli would transform himself from high school dropout to successful businessman.

Mr Bosley went on to a recurring role in Murder, She Wrote as Sheriff Amos Tucker, who was often outsmarted by Angela Lansbury’s mystery writer, Jessica Fletcher.

Born in Chicago in 1927, Mr Bosley served in the Navy before returning to his home town to study at De Paul University. Intrigued with acting, he enrolled at the Radio Institute of Chicago and began appearing in radio dramas.

After moving to New York, he studied at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg.

Mr Bosley married dancer Jean Eliot in 1962 and the couple had one child, Amy. Two years after his wife’s death in 1978, Mr Bosley married actress-producer Patricia Carr, who had three daughters from a previous marriage.