According to the AP. Here’s a NYT link.
Truly, he made Gandhi look like a child pornographer.
Wow. I’d thought he’d left us years ago. He was an insanely funny man.
That doesn’t make any sense.
This is sad; 76 is rapidly becoming a much too young age at which to die.
I liked him on the old Match Game,, but my fondest memory of him is his guest spot as science-fiction author Jose Chung on an episode of X-Files.
The joke is that Reilly was so nice and wonderful, that in comparison Gandhi would be on par with pedophiles. Clear things up? Great, now we can move on…
He beat the odds, Fiver. Believe it or not, the life expectancy at birth in the U.S. for white males born in 1931 was 60.8 years.
Damn, I really liked him. I first saw him in the TV version of “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.” Which reveals my age here, since that show was on in 1968. I thought he was really funny on Match game, especially taking shots at Brett Somers all the time. He also played a memorable role on the Drew Carey Show as the head of DrugCo, who refuses to return Drew’s dog after Speedy is accepted in a clinical trial of a drug designed to cure blindness.
Charles Nelson Reilly was also a well known and very good stage actor, wining a Tony for “How to Succeed in Business Wihout Really Trying.”
Is there any phonetic way to spell his throat-clearing laugh?
Hnnh-hnnnh-HNNNH!
Yeah, he was really great. And Alec Baldwin’s impersonation of him on SNL is classic!
That is the joke, but it comes from an SNL Inside the Actors Studio sketch where Lipton makes this comment about CNR, as played by Alec Baldwin- a truly hilarious sketch- Baldwin nailed him.
I have CNR as my work computer background- his bitchy interplay on Match Game with Brett the fag hag is some of the best game show TV, ever. His work is Lidsville was great as well.
Also great was the time on Match Game he took off his rug and put it on a bald contestants head.
On an equally classic episode of “Son of the Beach,” Notch Johnson must go undercover in a gay bar. He’s freaking out, as he has no idea how to act gay. Finally, he finds a pair of glasses, and begins channeling Charles Nelson Reilly.
Back when I was a little kid, and had absolutely zero gaydar, I thought he and Paul Lynde were hilarious, and had NO idea there were levels of meaning to any of their jokes!
If he’d had a less prosaic death we could say ‘How’s that for a topper!’
I never thought much of Charles Nelson Reilly’s acting with one exception. There was a TV program on in the summer of 1970 called Dean Martin Presents the Golddiggers in London. To understand that title, you young whippersnappers are going to have to learn a couple of things about TV variety programs back then. TV variety program hosts would often take the summer off and the network would show a summer replacement program in its time slot which was controlled by the regular host. Dean Martin took the summers off from his program and this show was its replacement. Variety programs often had their own dance troups who performed between acts or at the beginning of the show. Dean Martin’s dance troupe was the Golddiggers.
The 1970 summer program was shot in London, hence the title. Among the regulars on the show were Reilly and Marty Feldman. They performed in some comedy sketches which were, as far as I was concerned then, the funniest things I’d ever seen on TV. The sketches were, as I later realized, very Monty Python-like and written by Marty Feldman. Indeed, Marty Feldman had earlier appeared with Cleese and Chapman on a British TV program called At Last, the 1948 Show.
An interesting bit of trivia I only learned a couple years ago – he was a survivor of the infamous Hartford Circus Fire of 1944 (ya know, the one with “Little Miss 1565”).
Sir Rhosis
I was sad when I heard this…he seemed like a good guy. And there aren’t too many of his type in Hollywood these days, I think…people who were famous in large part because of their great personality. He didn’t need to be hawking a movie or whatever to be invited onto the Tonight Show…Johnny just invited him because he knew it would be a great conversation. I think that’s cool.
How many hosts these days would invite someone on their talk show simply because they knew the person would make great conversation? Letterman would do it with Teri Garr, but that’s the only case I can think of.
Enjoy!
I have very fond memories of a children’s show from the ‘70s called “Uncle Croc’s Block” which starred Charles Nelson Reilly and Jonathan Harris (best known as Dr. Smith from “Lost in Space”). This was one of the weirdest, funniest kids’ shows ever, and I suspect that most of the people who watched it were adults.
Good lord. I remember those.
I heard that instead of buying buried in a coffin he’ll be buried in a _____.