Few entertainers are instantly recognized over the decades by millions of us as soon as we hear their first names. Groucho. Marlon. Lucy. Madonna. Sting.…
Few entertainers are instantly recognized over the decades by millions of us as soon as we hear their first names. Groucho. Marlon. Lucy. Madonna. Sting. And the ordinary guy who improbably wound up coming into millions of homes for more hours than any other person in TV history over nearly 60 years — Regis.
The death Friday of Regis Francis Xavier Philbin at 88, announced Saturday, drops the curtain on the life a man the Guinness Book of World Records says spent more than 17,000 hours on TV.
At the height of his career following his work on local TV shows, the Emmy-award winning host starred in a top-rated ABC mid-morning show that went by several changing names from 1983 until his retirement in 2011. His TV co-hosts for most of those years were Kathie Lee Gifford at first and later Kelly Ripa.
Like a trapeze artist who worked without a net, Philbin worked without a script, adlibbing without writers and rehearsals. Hearing him was like hearing a neighbor you ran into at the supermarket or down the street. Millions of us felt like we knew him as an old friend, even though we never met him in person.
The eclectic mixture of celebrity interviews and friendly, often curmudgeonly banter on his shows played perfectly into Philbin’s “everyman” persona. If his alma mater Notre Dame (where he graduated in 1953 with a sociology degree) lost in football on Saturday, Regis was still inconsolable by Monday morning.
