Laughs: Part of game for ‘Feud’ host Dawson

Associated Press

NEW YORK

Richard Dawson brought a saucy, unabashedly touchy-feely style to TV game shows as host of “Family Feud.”

The British-born entertainer, who died Saturday at age 79 from complications related to esophageal cancer, had made his mark in the unlikely 1960s sitcom hit “Hogan’s Heroes,” which mined laughs from a Nazi POW camp whose prisoners hoodwink their captors and run the place themselves.

But it is as the kissing, wisecracking quizmaster of “Feud” that he will be remembered.

The show, which initially ran from 1976 to 1985, pitted a pair of families against each other as they tried to guess the most-popular answers to poll questions.

He won a daytime Emmy Award in 1978 as best game-show host.

Dawson played the show, and his duties presiding over it, for laughs.

On one episode, he asked a contestant: “During what month of pregnancy does a woman begin to look pregnant?”

She blurted out “September,” then, too late, realized it was a ridiculous response. All the better for Dawson, who couldn’t stop laughing — or milking the moment for continued laughs from the audience.

His swaggering, randy manner (and working-bloke’s British accent) set him apart from other TV quizmasters. He was overtly physical, prone to invading his contestants’ personal space — and especially the women, each of whom he kissed without exception.

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.

One of them he kissed was Gretchen Johnson, an attractive young contestant who came on with members of her family in 1981. She and Dawson began dating, and, after a decade together, they wed in 1991. (Dawson is survived by Gretchen and their daughter Shannon, as well as two sons, Mark and Gary, from his first marriage, and four grandchildren.)

Dawson reprised his game-show character in a much darker mood in the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film “The Running Man.”

Dawson was born Colin Lionel Emm in 1932 in Gosport, England. He first got into show business as a standup comedian. In the late 1950s, he met Diana Dors, a film star who became known as Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe. They married in 1959 and divorced a decade later.