Television personality Peter Marshall reacts after being inducted into the American TV Game Show Hall of Fame, In Las Vegas, on October 13, 2007.Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Peter Marshall, the actor and singer turned game show host who played straight man to the stars for 16 years on The Hollywood Squares, has died. He was 98.
He died Thursday of kidney failure at his home in the Encino neighbourhood of Los Angeles, publicist Harlan Boll said.
Mr. Marshall helped define the form of the smooth, professional, but never-too-serious modern game show host on more than 5,000 episodes of the series that ran on NBC from 1966 to 1981.
But he was often closer to a talk-show host, and the tic-tac-toe game the contestants played, while real, was all an excuse for a good time. The questions Mr. Marshall posed to regulars such as Paul Lynde, George Gobel and Joan Rivers were designed to be set-ups for joke answers before the real ones followed.
“It was the easiest thing I’ve ever done in show business,” Mr. Marshall said in a 2010 interview for the Archive of American Television. “I walked in, said ‘Hello stars,’ I read questions and laughed. And it paid very well.”
The Hollywood Squares would become an American cultural institution and make Mr. Marshall a household name. It would win four Daytime Emmys for outstanding game show during his run and spawned dozens of international versions and several U.S. reboots. Not only was it a forum for such character actors as Charlie Weaver (the stage name of Cliff Arquette) and Wally Cox, but the show attracted a range of top stars as occasional guests, including Aretha Franklin, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Ed Asner and Janet Leigh.
Mr. Marshall had a warm rapport with Mr. Weaver, Mr. Lynde and others, but said that Mr. Gobel, the wry comedian, actor and variety show host, held a special place, tweeting in 2021 that it’s “no secret he was my closest friend on Hollywood Squares and my absolute all-time favorite Square!”
Mr. Marshall had lived nearly an entire show business life before he took the Squares podium at the age of 40.
He had toured with big bands starting as a teenager, had been a part of two comedy teams that appeared in nightclubs and on television, appeared in movies as a contract player for Twentieth Century Fox, and had sung in several Broadway musicals when the opportunity came up after Bert Parks, who hosted the pilot, bowed out.
“I am a singer first I am not a game show host,” Mr. Marshall told his hometown paper, the Herald-Dispatch of Huntington, W.Va., in 2013, “that was just a freak opportunity. I had been on Broadway with Julie Harris and was going back to Broadway when I did the audition, and I thought it was a few weeks but that turned into 16 years.”
The Hollywood Squares was more straitlaced when it began, but early in its run a producer suggested they write jokes for Mr. Lynde, the ever-snarky comic actor who occupied the centre square and would become as identified as Mr. Marshall with the show.
The first joke would set the template for the years that followed:
Mr. Marshall: “Paul, why do motorcyclists wear leather?”
Mr. Lynde: “Because chiffon wrinkles.”
“That changed the whole thing,” Mr. Marshall told the TV archive. “I had been a straight man. So working with comics was easy for me.”
Born Ralph Pierre LaCock in Clarksburg, W.Va., Mr. Marshall would move around the state as a child, living in Wheeling and Huntington.
His father died when Peter was 10, and he would live with his grandparents as his mother and sister, the actress Joanne Dru, moved to New York to pursue her career in show business. Peter would soon join them.
At 15, he toured as a singer with the Bob Chester Orchestra. He also worked as an NBC Radio page and an usher at the Paramount Theater. He was drafted during the Second World War and stationed in Italy, where he made his first forays onto the airways as a DJ for Armed Forces Radio. In 1949 he formed a comedy duo with Tommy Noonan, appearing in nightclubs, in theatres and on The Ed Sullivan Show.
He became a movie contract player in the 1950s at Twentieth Century Fox, appearing in films including 1959′s The Rookie and 1961′s Swingin’ Along.
Major starring roles eluded him in Hollywood, but he would find them in musical theatre.
He starred opposite Chita Rivera in Bye Bye Birdie in London’s West End in 1962 – Mr. Lynde had played a major role in the Broadway version that he would reprise in the film – and played his first starring role on Broadway in Skyscraper with Julie Harris in 1965.
He would also appear in Broadway versions of High Button Shoes, The Music Man and 42nd Street.
After The Hollywood Squares, Mr. Marshall would host a few other short-lived game shows, but mostly resumed his career as a singing actor, starring in more than 800 performances of La Cage Aux Folles on Broadway and on tour, and singing in the 1983 film version of Annie.
He was married three times, the last to Laurie Stewart in 1989.
The couple survived a bout with COVID-19 early in 2021. He was hospitalized for several weeks.
His four kids include son Pete LaCock, a former professional baseball player for the Chicago Cubs and Kansas City Royals. Marshall also leaves daughters Suzanne and Jaime, son David, 12 grandchildren, and nine great-great grandchildren.