Match Game Fixture Reilly Dies

Jack Lemmon and Steve McQueen were New York acting school contemporaries of the acclaimed stage star and director named...blank.

The Match Game answer is: Charles Nelson Reilly.

Reilly, whose award-winning theater career was overshadowed by his knack for filling in the blanks with punchlines on Match Game and other TV game shows, has died of pneumonia, his partner told Monday's New York Times.

The actor-director passed away last Friday in his Beverly Hills home, Patrick Hughes told the paper. Reilly was said to have been in failing health for more than a year. He was 76.

For the uninitiated, the Game Show Network offers everyday proof of why Reilly was as much a part of the 1970s as the pet rock. The Internet Broadway Database offers evidence of a career that was much broader than his banter with Brett Somers suggested.

Reilly directed five Broadway plays, appeared in the original productions of Bye Bye Birdie, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and Hello, Dolly!, earned three Tony nominations, including one for directing the 1997 production of The Gin Game, and won one, for his supporting work in How to Succeed.

In 2002, Reilly won a Drama Desk Award for his one-man show of an autobiography, Save It for the Stage: The Life of Reilly.

"I was told that I would never be allowed on television," Reilly said in the show's 2006 film version, The Life of Reilly, "and now I gotta try to figure out who do you have to f--- to get off."

The quip offered a good summary of Reilly's career, if not his career dilemma: Once told by a network executive that TV was off-limits to "queers," the Bronx-born actor, who was gay, became known as a TV personality to the exclusion of everything else.

Reilly guested on sitcoms (Nanny and the Professor, The Patty Duke Show, Family Matters, etc.), cackled his way through a children's show (Sid and Marty Krofft's colorful, but typically creepy Lidsville), sat down on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show couch 95 times, per one popularly cited count, and, of course, did game shows.

Lots of game shows.

What's My Line?, Baffle, Super Password and Hollywood Squares were among Reilly's credits. Match Game was by far the biggest.

To explain exactly what Match Game was, or what Reilly did on it, is perhaps best left to a Game Show Network description of a February 1976 episode: "Brett and Charles get into such a bad fight that Gene separates them, moving Charles to the bottom row."

Brett was the aforementioned Brett Somers, an actress best known, like Reilly, for being the game-show version of herself. Gene was Gene Rayburn, the host best known for his probe-like microphone.

As for Match Game, it was less of a quiz show, and more of an excuse for Reilly, Somers and Rayburn (and sometimes Richard Dawson and Fannie Flagg) to bicker, try to make each other laugh, and unleash some barely doubled entendres.

With apologies to Somers' giant glasses, and Rayburn's impossibly long microphone, Reilly cut the show's most distinctive figure, as he was often seen puffing a pipe, wearing a captain's hat and donning glasses even larger than Somers'.

The most popular version of Match Game ran on daytime TV from 1973 to '79, and in syndication from 1975 to '81, per an accounting by Total Television.

Post-Match Game, Reilly frequently worked with Burt Reynolds, from Cannonball Run II to the star's 1990s sitcom, Evening Shade. He also found success with Chris Carter, appearing on a 1996 episode of Carter's The X-Files, and a 1997 episode of the producer's lesser-known series, Millennium. Reilly played the same character, a writer named Jose Chung, in both Carter shows; he netted the second of his three career Emmy nominations for the Millennium performance.

Born Jan. 13, 1931, per the Internet Movie Database, Reilly trained for the acting life under the tutelage of Uta Hagen, and alongside the likes of Lemmon and McQueen.

Those master classes won't be on cable TV on Tuesday morning or the morning after that; Match Game will. As Reilly well knew.

"When I die, it's going to read, 'Game Show Fixture Passes Away,'" Reilly once said, per a Hollywood Stock Exchange review of Life of Reilly. "Nothing about the theater, or Tony Awards, or Emmys. But it doesn't bother me."