What Did Richard Dawson Died Of

Richard Dawson spent the best part of two decades leaning into a microphone and demanding "survey says!", so you'd think a bloke who made his living off other people's answers would have left us with a nice clean one about his own exit. He didn't, really. The English-born, American-adopted telly legend — the same cheeky sod who played Peter Newkirk on Hogan's Heroes and grinned his way through Match Game with a cigar in hand — died on 2 June 2012 at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 79. The cause was complications from esophageal cancer, which he'd reportedly been diagnosed with only about a month earlier. Not exactly a glamorous farewell for a man who once fronted one of the highest-rating daytime shows on American telly, but cancer has never been much of a respecter of reputations.

So What Actually Took Him Out? The Straight Answer, No Buzzer Required

Esophageal cancer is a nasty piece of work that hides at the bottom of your food pipe and quietly narrows the plumbing while you assume you've just been eating too fast. It's frequently caught late, because the early symptoms — a bit of heartburn, food sticking on the way down, a croaky voice — are exactly the sort of thing you'd shrug off and blame on last night's curry. Risk factors include long-term smoking, heavy drinking, chronic reflux and, in some cases, Barrett's esophagus. Dawson was a reported long-time smoker, which puts him squarely in the at-risk bracket. He was 79 when he died, and he'd already had a decent crack at a full life, so there's at least that. Either way, "complications from esophageal cancer" is the official answer on the board, and for once nobody argued with the survey.

From Newkirk to Killian: A Career Built Entirely on Cheek

Long before he was the man handing out cash and planting one on the cheek of every female contestant, Dawson was born Colin Lionel Emm in Gosport, Hampshire, and moved to the States to make it big. He did, mostly via a POW camp sitcom and a panel show where the whole point was flirting outrageously. Then came Family Feud, which he hosted from 1976 to 1985 and again in 1994, mastering the art of the fake-sympathetic grimace when a family scored nine points on "name something you take to the beach". He also played Damon Killian in The Running Man, a role so perfectly cast that Arnold Schwarzenegger may as well have been holding the door open for him. And yes, he kissed the contestants. By modern standards it's the sort of thing that would have had a compliance officer weeping into their clipboard, but in the seventies it was just Tuesday.

So there's your answer, in one tidy little package: Richard Dawson died of complications from esophageal cancer, aged 79, about a month after being diagnosed. Not the punchline anyone wanted, and not one you can lighten up much. But if you're keen to remember him properly, skip the sad bit and go watch him wring a confession out of a contestant over what they keep in the glovebox. Survey says: absolute legend.