A friend of mine just sent me the sad news that Charles Nelson Reilly has died at 76.
He gained fame by becoming what he described as a "game show fixture" in the 1970s and 80s. He was a regular on programs like "Match Game" and "Hollywood Squares," often wearing giant glasses and colorful suits with ascots.
His larger-than-life persona and affinity for double-entendres also landed him on the "Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson more than 95 times.
Reilly ruefully admitted his wild game show appearances adversely affected his acting career. "You can't do anything else once you do game shows," he told The Advocate, the national gay magazine, in 2001. "You have no career."
I loved the Match Game when I was a kid, and especially liked the banter between host Gene Rayburn and celebrity panelists Reilly, Brett Somers and Richard Dawson. Although I was way too young to understand the double entendres and sometimes adult humor, I was still fascinated by it.
I've done closed captioning off and on for the last four years or so, sometimes full-time, sometimes part-time, and sometimes not at all. The reason I keep going back is because I enjoyed so many of the shows I've worked on. We worked on hundreds of Match Games, and I loved watching Reilly's dry sense of humor.
One of the more interesting things about rewatching those game shows as an adult was realizing how many gay jokes Reilly and the other panelists (and Rayburn) told on a regular basis. He was the first openly gay person I had regular contact with (if that's what you can call television). Sure, there were others, but not with the daily dose of humor with which we saw Reilly. Of course, as a child, references to his homosexuality were subtle enough I didn't get it.
Reilly's openly gay television persona was ahead of its time, and sometimes stood in his way.
He recalled a network executive telling him "they don't let queers on television."
That's certainly not the case these days. Reilly lives on on the Game Show Network, but he will still be sorely missed.
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