'Hollywood Squares' would win four Daytime Emmys for outstanding game show during his run and spawned dozens of international versions and several U.S. reboots.
FILE - Host Peter Marshall appears at the 45th annual Daytime Emmy Awards at the Pasadena Civic Center on Sunday, April 29, 2018, in Pasadena, Calif. Marshall, who spent 16 years as host of “The Hollywood Squares,” has died at 98.
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. “The Hollywood Squares” would become an American cultural institution and make 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 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.
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.
“That changed the whole thing,” Marshall told the TV archive. “I had been a straight man. So working with comics was easy for me.” 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 World War II 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 theaters and on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
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