Family Feud Hosts That Died3/26/2021
The Kissing Bandit, who hosted from 1976 to 1985, has died at 79.It is with a very heavy heart that I inform you that my father passed away this evening from complications due to esophageal cancer.He was an amazing talent, a loving husband, a great dad, and a doting grandfather.
In addition to hosting Family Feud, Dawson was an actor, best known for his role as Corporal Peter Newkirk on Hogans Heroes. He also played Damon Killian, the host of the titular game show in The Running Man, the proto- Hunger Games. Although Dawson met his wife Gretchen Johnson when she was a contestant on Family Feud, he didnt make any further moves. When he briefly hosted again in 1994, he dropped the trademark kissing. Luckily, those moments of awkward physical contact live on in YouTube videos along with the classic clip of Dawson losing his shit at contestant stupidity. Dawson landed roles in U.S. comedy and variety shows in the early 1960s, including The Steve Allen Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show. The game show, which initially ran from 1976 to 1985, pitted families who tried to guess the most popular answers to poll questions such as What do people give up when they go on a diet. He made his hearty, soaring delivery of the phrase Survey says. Dawson won a daytime Emmy Award in 1978 as best game show host. Tom Shales of The Washington Post called him the fastest, brightest and most beguilingly caustic interlocutor since the late great Groucho bantered and parried on You Bet Your Life. The show was so popular it was released as both daytime and syndicated evening versions. His swaggering, randy style (and British accent) set him apart from other TV quizmasters. He was known for kissing each woman contestant, and at the time the show bowed out in 1985, executive producer Howard Felsher estimated that Dawson had kissed somewhere in the vicinity of 20,000. I kissed them for luck and love, thats all, Dawson said at the time. One of them he kissed was Gretchen Johnson, a young contestant who appeared with members of her family in 1981. Dawson reprised his game show character in a much darker mood in the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film The Running Man, playing the host of a deadly TV show set in a totalitarian future, where convicts try to escape as their executioners stalk them. ![]() The British-born actor already had gained fame as the fast-talking Newkirk in Hogans Heroes, the CBS comedy that starred Bob Crane and mined laughs from a Nazi POW camp whose prisoners hoodwink their captors and run the place themselves. Despite its unlikely premise, the show made the ratings top 10 in its first season, 1965-66, and ran until 1971. We ran six years, Dawson once quipped, a year longer than Hitler. Both Hogans Heroes and Family Feud have had a second life in recent years, the former on DVD reissues and the latter on GSN, formerly known as the Game Show Network. On Dawsons last Family Feud in 1985, the studio audience honored him with a standing ovation, and he responded: Please sit down. I have to do at least 30 minutes of fun and laughter and you make me want to cry. Ive had the most incredible luck in my career, he told viewers, adding, I never dreamed I would have a job in which so many people could touch me and I could touch them. Producers brought out The New Family Feud, starring comedian Ray Combs, in 1988. Six years later, Dawson replaced Combs at the helm, but that lasted only one season. Dawson was born Colin Lionel Emm in 1932 in Gosport, England. When he was 14 he joined the Merchant Marines, serving three years. He first got into show business as a stand-up comedian, playing clubs in Londons West End including the legendary Stork Room. It was there, in the late 1950s, he met blond bombshell Diana Dors, the film star who became known as Britains answer to Marilyn Monroe. Dawson landed roles in U.S. The Steve Allen Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show.
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