NEW YORK — Richard Dawson brought a saucy, touchy-feely style to TV game shows as host of “Family Feud.”
The British-born entertainer, who died Saturday in Los Angeles at age 79 from complications related to esophageal cancer, made his mark in the 1960s sitcom hit “Hogan’s Heroes,” which mined laughs from a Nazi POW camp whose prisoners hoodwink their captors.
But it is as the kissing, wisecracking quizmaster of “Feud” that he will be remembered.
The show, which initially ran from 1976 to 1985, featured families trying to guess the most popular answers to poll questions such as “What do people give up when they go on a diet?”
Dawson made his hearty, soaring pronouncement of the phrase “Survey says …” a national catchphrase.
He won a daytime Emmy Award in 1978 as best game- show host. The show was so popular, there were daytime and syndicated evening versions.
His swaggering, randy manner (and working bloke’s British accent) set him apart from other TV quizmasters, who, more often than not, tempered any boisterous inclinations with defiant smoothness. Not Dawson, who 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 at the time.
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.
