Charles Nelson Reilly, 76; Tony Award winner, zany TV fixture

LOS ANGELES -- Charles Nelson Reilly, whose persona as a wacky game-show panelist and talk-show guest overshadowed his serious work as a director and Tony Award-winning actor, has died. He was 76.

Mr. Reilly, a longtime resident of Beverly Hills, died Friday of complications from pneumonia at the University of California, Los Angeles, Medical Center, said Paul Linke, who directed Mr. Reilly's one-man show "Save It for the Stage: The Life of Reilly."

"The average person thinks of him as being on 'The Match Game,' " Linke said. "One of the reasons I was so motivated to get his show out there was because I wanted people to recognize that this was a heavyweight talent."

Wearing his trademark ascot and oversized glasses, Mr. Reilly made a near-record 97 appearances on "The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson," often making ribald ripostes.

When a "Tonight Show" guest who was talking about Shakespeare dismissed Mr. Reilly's attempt to join the conversation, he silenced her by delivering Hamlet's "the play's the thing" monologue straight, with depth and passion, reported the New York Observer in 2001.

He broke through on Broadway in 1961, winning a Tony Award for playing the insidious nephew Bud Frump in the musical "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying."

Mr. Reilly also received Tony nominations for his role in "Hello, Dolly!" in 1964 and for directing a revival of "The Gin Game" with Julie Harris in 1997. He often directed plays that starred Harris, including "The Belle of Amherst" in 1977, a one-woman play about Emily Dickinson that remained one of his proudest achievements.

"He's a wonderful actor but never gets enough chance to do it," Harris said in 2000. "He's taught me a lot about theater. It's his insight into the personal idiosyncrasies of human beings. He's attuned to small details -- the pieces of the puzzle that make up the whole picture."

Burt Reynolds, a close friend, once said that he thought Mr. Reilly's reputation as the perpetual jester had worked against him in Hollywood.

"We have a thing in this town that if you are enormously witty and gregarious, you can't be very deep. There's something wrong with a society that says, 'You're the wit, but you're not the teacher.' People just haven't seen him in this arena," Reynolds said.

A well-regarded acting instructor, Mr. Reilly moved to Florida in 1979 to teach at the Burt Reynolds Institute. He also coached the young Liza Minnelli, Bette Midler, Lily Tomlin, and Christine Lahti.

In his one-man show, which would be his final work, Mr. Reilly told the story of his life. The play's name came from the phrase his mother often said when her son spoke: "Save it for the stage." In 2006, the show was made into the movie "The Life of Reilly."

Born Jan. 13, 1931, in New York, Mr. Reilly was the only child of Signe Elvera Nelson and Charles Joseph Reilly, who designed outdoor advertising for Paramount Pictures.

After his father suffered a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized, Mr. Reilly and his mother moved to Hartford, Conn., to live with 10 relatives, all of whom spoke Swedish. The apartment had only cold water.

"Eugene O'Neill could never begin to get near all this," Mr. Reilly said in 2000.

At 9, he got the lead in the school play, and a teacher told his mother that the boy was the only true actor she had ever known.

When he was 13, he and a friend survived the Hartford circus fire in 1944 that killed more than 165 people. It was the last time he would sit in a theater as an audience member, Mr. Reilly repeatedly said.

By 18, he had moved to New York and was soon studying with Uta Hagen and her husband, Herbert Berghof, at their acting school. Classmates included Jack Lemmon, Charles Grodin, Geraldine Page, and Hal Holbrook.

Mr. Reilly got a job as a night mail boy at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel and tried to get hired by NBC, but a producer told him "that they don't allow queers on television," Linke said.

"Charles' response was, 'It didn't bother me. I knew in my heart his words weren't true,' " Linke said.

Later, Mr. Reilly would count how many game-show appearances he would make in a week -- once it was 27 -- and consider it his revenge. He frequently cracked double-entendres on television about being gay.

Mr. Reilly leaves his partner, Patrick Hughes.