RIP Richard Dawson

CPL Newkirk

Host of Family Feud

Another great one passes.

'Family Feud' TV host Richard Dawson dies at 79


LOS ANGELES (AP) — Richard Dawson, the wisecracking British entertainer who was among the schemers in the 1960s TV comedy "Hogan's Heroes" and a decade later began kissing thousands of female contestants as host of the game show "Family Feud" has died. He was 79.


Dawson, also known to TV fans as the Cockney prisoner-of-war Cpl. Peter Newkirk on "Hogan's Heroes," died Saturday night from complications related to esophageal cancer at Ronald Reagan Memorial Hospital, his son Gary said.


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?"


Dawson won a daytime Emmy Award in 1978 as best TV 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.


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, that's all," Dawson said at the time.


He 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. "Saturday Night Live" mocked him in the 1970s, with Bill Murray portraying him as leering and nasty, even slapping one contestant (John Belushi) for getting too fresh.


The British-born actor already had gained fame as the fast-talking Newkirk in "Hogan's Heroes," the CBS comedy about prisoners in a Nazi POW camp who hoodwink their captors and run the place themselves...


..."I've had the most incredible luck in my career," he told viewers.


"I never dreamed I would have a job in which so many people could touch me and I could touch them," he said. That triggered an unexpected laugh...

I've often said a great performer's talent is shown by his taking on a new challenge. In the things he's best known for (Hogan's Heroes and Family Feud) he played a "good character". In The Running Man he did an excellent job of playing a jerk (to put it nicely).

In this scene he's about to send Arnold into the running game and Schwarzenegger gives his trademark line, "...I'll be back." Dawson's retort, "Only in a rerun."

Damned, another great one down. Of the original cast of Hogan's Heroes he is the sixth of the cast to pass (John Banner (SGT Schultz 1973), Bob Crane (COL Hogan 1978), Werner Klemperer (COL Klink 2000), Larry Hovis (SGT Carter 2003) and Ivan Dixon (SGT 'Kinch' Kinchloe, 2008).

RIP Richard...you will be missed.