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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Actor became face of popular game show
Richard Dawson, hosting Family Feud (CP)
NEW YORK -- Richard Dawson, the wisecracking British entertainer who was among the schemers in the 1960s sitcom Hogan's Heroes and a decade later began kissing thousands of female contestants as host of Family Feud, has died. He was 79.
Dawson, also known to TV fans as the Cockney POW Cpl. Peter Newkirk on Hogan's Heroes, died Saturday night in Los Angeles from complications related to esophageal cancer, his son Gary said.
Game show Family Feud, 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 delivery of the phrase "Survey says..." a national catchphrase among viewers.
Dawson won a daytime Emmy Award in 1978 as best game show host. 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.
One of them he kissed was Gretchen Johnson, a young contestant who appeared in 1981. After a decade together, she and Dawson wed in 1991. They had a daughter.
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.
The actor already had gained fame as Newkirk in Hogan's Heroes, the CBS comedy that mined laughs from a Nazi POW camp whose prisoners hoodwink their captors and run the place themselves.
On Dawson's last Family Feud in 1985, the audience honoured 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."
Producers brought out The New Family Feud in 1988. Six years later, Dawson replaced comedian Ray Combs at the helm, but that lasted only one season.
-- The Associated Press
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 4, 2012 D2
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