• Orson From Match Game
• Orson From Match Game Rules
• Match Game 77 Orson Bean

• On 22-7-1928 Orson Bean (nickname: Orson Bean) was born in Burlington, Vermont. He made his 4 million dollar fortune with The Match Game, To Tell The Truth & Being John Malkovich. The tv-personality & actor his starsign is Cancer and he is now 92 years of age.
• Orson Bean makes a special appearance to stand-by to take Gary Burghoff's place if his wife goes into labor during the show.

Watch The Match Game - Season 2, Episode 48 - Jayne Mansfield & Orson Bean: No. 411-415: JULY 27-31, 1964. The 2 Star Team Captains are Actress-Blonde Bombshell Jayne Mansfield & Orson Bean ('To.

John 'Johnny' Leonard Olson (May 22, 1910 – October 12, 1985)^[2] was an American radio personality and televisionannouncer. Olson is perhaps best known for his work as an announcer for game shows, particularly the work he did for Mark Goodson-Bill Todman Productions. Olson was the longtime announcer for the original To Tell the Truth and What's My Line?, and spent over a decade as the announcer for both Match Game and The Price Is Right, working on the latter series at the time of his death.

Early career[edit]

Born in Windom, Minnesota, Olson enrolled in pharmacy classes at the University of Minnesota. He also worked a string of odd jobs, from soda jerk to singer. After 1928, he landed jobs at WIBA in Poynette, Wisconsin and KGDA in Mitchell, South Dakota.

Olson joined WTMJ in Milwaukee in early 1933, organizing a five-piece jazz band called The Rhythm Rascals, and became one of the station's most popular personalities. The Rascals eventually made it to Hollywood, and would send daily recordings of their shows back to WTMJ. Olson would eventually return to Milwaukee and WTMJ, where he would go on to create the first iteration of Johnny Olson's Rumpus Room. The show attracted major national performers, including Spike Jones and The Andrews Sisters. By 1942, the immense popularity of Rumpus Room prompted WTMJ to dedicate the large unfinished television studio (plans for what would later become WTMJ-TV were suspended due to World War II) in their new facility to the program.

Olson's first network job on radio was in New York City in 1944, hosting (with his wife) the audience-participation show Ladies Be Seated, a stunt game along the lines of Truth or Consequences, broadcast on NBC Blue.^[3] He had previously hosted several radio shows in Chicago, including the second iteration of Johnny Olson's Rumpus Room, a late-night variety show broadcast from 10:30 p.m. to 12 midnight, which was also the name of a later daytime talk show he hosted on the DuMont Television Network.^[4] He also was host of Johnny Olson's Luncheon Club on ABC radio in 1950-1951.^[3]

Work for DuMont Television Network[edit]

In 1945, Olson and his wife hosted a five-week run of a TV version of Ladies Be Seated.^[5]:577 From May 1947 to July 1949, Olson hosted Doorway to Fame, an evening television talent show on the new DuMont Television Network. From January 1949 to July 1952, Olson hosted Johnny Olson's Rumpus Room, a daytime television talk show which was the first daytime show broadcast from DuMont's flagship station WABD over DuMont's small East Coast network. Olson also hosted the Saturday-morning children's show Kids and Company on DuMont from September 1951 to June 1952, with co-host Ham Fisher.

Early announcing work[edit]

On television, Olson was an announcer on Break the Bank^[5] and was the announcer and sometimes the host on Fun for the Money on ABC-TV in 1949.^[5]:372 Olson was the announcer on the final year of the CBS version of Name That Tune in 1958; also in that year, Olson began his long association with Mark Goodson-Bill Todman Productions^{[citation needed]} when he began announcing for the Merv Griffin-hosted Play Your Hunch,^[6]:288-289 which lasted until 1963. In the late 1960s, he was also a substitute announcer on the ABC version of Supermarket Sweep.^{[citation needed]}

Beginning in 1960, Olson announced the CBS prime-time panel game To Tell the Truth. The following year, he added duties on sister show What's My Line?, and in 1962 began announcing on the original Match Game in daytime on NBC until that series ended in 1969. What's My Line was televised live from New York City in what later became the Ed Sullivan Theater. Before going live, Olson did an audience warm-up by asking questions and getting the audience ready for the live telecast.

Olson was also announcer for The Jackie Gleason Show^[1] from 1962 until its cancellation in 1970. The first few seasons of the variety show were recorded in New York City, while the last few seasons were produced in Miami Beach, Florida.

Olson continued to announce What's My Line? and To Tell the Truth after both shows moved from CBS to syndication in the late 1960s. His involvement with those shows ended when he was designated announcer of the 1972 revivals of The Price Is Right and I've Got a Secret, both of which were taped in Hollywood, where he relocated.

He was the announcer, 1966-1970, for five of The Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethons.^[7]

The Price Is Right[edit]

While Name That Tune, To Tell the Truth, What's My Line, and The Match Game put Olson in the elite class of television game-show announcers, the revival of The Price Is Right cemented Olson's fame.^[8] In addition to serving as host Bob Barker's sidekick, Olson was a beloved and valued member of the 'cast.' He warmed up the audiences prior to taping; during taping, he often received on-camera exposure (occasionally bantering with Barker) prior to calling out the contestants' names; he also frequently appeared in the showcases.^[9]

His exhortation for contestants to 'Come on down!' became a catchphrase, and a Price Is Right tradition observed by his successors Rod Roddy (1986–2003), Rich Fields (2004–2010), and George Gray (2011–present).^[10]

Match Game and later career[edit]

In 1973,^[11] Olson began announcing for the revived Match Game,^[6] another show transplanted from New York to California; the show's tagline, 'Get ready to match the stars!' became a second catchphrase associated with him for the following nine years.^[11] Like executive producer Mark Goodson, Olson filled in on the days when a scheduled guest failed to appear in time for a taping. Olson only missed one taping of Match Game during the CBS years; Bern Bennett served as his fill-in for one week of daytime shows and one nighttime show in 1975 (a week's worth of shows was taped in one workday).

During the 1970s and early 1980s, during the peak of his announcing duties on Price and Match, he worked on several other Goodson-Todman game shows. He announced:

• Now You See It,
• Concentration (both hosted by Jack Narz),
• Mindreaders (hosted by Dick Martin),
• Double Dare (hosted by Alex Trebek),
• Body Language (hosted by Tom Kennedy), and
• the 1982-84 revival of Tattletales (hosted by Bert Convy).

He also filled in for

• Bob Hilton on Blockbusters
• Gene Wood on the NBC version of Card Sharks
• The Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour.

Death[edit]

On October 6, 1985, Olson had a stroke on his way to work and was taken to St. Johns Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica, California, where he died on October 12, 1985, at age 75.^[9] The following Monday, October 14, Bob Barker paid tribute to Olson in an attached 20-second segment that followed the end credits of The Price Is Right. The last new Olson-announced The Price Is Right episode aired on November 21, 1985. Olson was entombed at Rosewood Cemetery in Lewisburg, West Virginia.Following Johnny's death on October 12th, 1985, starting on Monday, October 14th, 1985, at the end of each Price Is Right episode until 1986, Bob Barker gave a 20 second tribute speech in honor of Olson:^{[citation needed]}

Since taping this program, we've lost our good friend, Johnny Olson. You will continue to see and hear Johnny on the many programs he's already taped, he was dearly loved by all of us, and he'll be sorely missed.

Following the tribute, a picture of Johnny Olson is shown, with the text 'IN MEMORIAM 1910-1985'.

References[edit]

1. ^ ^abHarris, Scott (October 13, 1985). 'Johnny Olson, 'Come-on-Down' Man of 'Price Is Right' Dies'. The Los Angeles Times. California, Los Angeles. p. Part II - 3. Retrieved April 13, 2020 – via Newspapers.com.
2. ^'Johnny and Penny Olson Papers, 1927-1997'.
3. ^ ^abDunning, John (1998). On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio. Oxford University Press. p. 387. ISBN978-0-19-977078-6. Retrieved April 13, 2020.
4. ^Hyatt, Wesley (1997). The Encyclopedia of Daytime Television. Watson-Guptill Publications. pp. 241–242. ISBN978-0823083152. Retrieved 22 March 2020.
5. ^ ^abcTerrace, Vincent (2014). Encyclopedia of Television Shows, 1925 through 2010, 2d ed. McFarland. p. 133. ISBN978-0-7864-8641-0. Retrieved April 13, 2020.
6. ^ ^abTerrace, Vincent (2013). Television Introductions: Narrated TV Program Openings since 1949. Scarecrow Press. p. 281. ISBN978-0-8108-9250-7. Retrieved April 13, 2020.
7. ^'Jerry won't rest until there's a cure'. Crossville Chronicle.
8. ^Randy West. Johnny Olson: A Voice in Time: West, Randy. ISBN978-1-5939-3471-2.
9. ^ ^ab'TV Announcer Johnny Olson Dead at 75'. Schenectady Gazette. United Press International. October 14, 1985. Retrieved April 4, 2018.
10. ^'Johnny Olson Come On Down'. Associated Press (APnews).
11. ^ ^ab'Johnny Olson (1910-1985)'.

External links[edit]

• Johnny Olson on IMDb
• Johnny Olson at the Internet Broadway Database
• Johnny Olson at Find a Grave

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

Orson Welles, in full George Orson Welles, (born May 6, 1915, Kenosha, Wisconsin, U.S.—died October 10, 1985, Los Angeles, California), American motion-picture actor, director, producer, and writer. His innovative narrative techniques and use of photography, dramatic lighting, and music to further the dramatic line and to create mood made his Citizen Kane (1941)—which he wrote, directed, produced, and acted in—one of the most-influential films in the history of the art.

Early work

Welles was born to a mother, Beatrice Ives, who was a concert pianist and a crack rifle shot, and a father, Richard Welles, who was an inventor and a businessman. Welles was a child prodigy, adept at the piano and violin, acting, drawing, painting, and writing verse; he also entertained his friends by performing magic tricks and staging mini productions of William Shakespeare’s plays.

Welles’s parents separated when he was four years old, and his mother died when he was nine. In 1926 Welles entered the exclusive Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois. There his gifts found fertile ground, and he dazzled the teachers and students with stagings of both modern and classical plays. His father died in 1930, and Welles became the ward of a family friend, Chicago doctor Maurice Bernstein. In 1931 he graduated from Todd, but, instead of attending college, he studied briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago before traveling to Dublin, where he successfully auditioned at the Gate Theatre for the part of the Duke of Württemberg in a stage adaptation of Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Jew Süss.

Welles remained in Ireland for a year, acting with the company at the Abbey Theatre as well as at the Gate; he also designed sets, wrote a newspaper column, and began directing plays. In 1932 Welles left Dublin and tried to get work on the stages of London and New York; unsuccessful, he instead traveled for a year in Morocco and Spain. In 1933 in the United States, he was introduced to actress Katharine Cornell by author Thornton Wilder and was hired to act in Cornell’s road company, playing Mercutio in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Marchbanks in George Bernard Shaw’s Candida, and Octavius Barrett in Rudolf Besier’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street. In 1934 Welles organized a summer drama festival at the Todd School, where he played Svengali in an adaptation of George du Maurier’s Trilby and Claudius in Hamlet. At the end of the festival, he made his first film, the short The Hearts of Age. With Todd School headmaster Roger Hill, he prepared Everybody’s Shakespeare (1934), editions for performance of Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, and Julius Caesar, with introductions by Hill and Welles and illustrations by Welles. He made his New York debut as Tybalt in Cornell’s production of Romeo and Juliet in December 1934.

Theatre and radio in the 1930s

Orson From Match Game

When Welles was performing in Romeo and Juliet, he met producer John Houseman, who immediately cast him as the lead in Archibald MacLeish’s verse play Panic, which premiered in 1935 for Houseman’s Phoenix Theatre Group. They then moved on in 1936 to mounting productions for the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA’s) Federal Theatre Project. Their first effort, for the Federal Theatre’s Negro Division, was Macbeth, with an all African American cast and the setting changed from Scotland to Haiti. They began 1937 with Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus (starring Welles). Their most (in)famous effort was Marc Blitzstein’s proletarian musical play The Cradle Will Rock. WPA guards shut down the theatre the night before its opening. (The shutdown was ostensibly for budgetary reasons; however, the political nature of the play was considered too radical.) Welles and Houseman quickly rented another theatre, and on opening night the play was presented with the actors performing their roles from seats in the audience. That same year they formed the Mercury Theatre, which presented a renowned modern-dress version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In 1938 the Mercury Theatre presented William Gillette’s comedy Too Much Johnson. Welles shot three short silent films to precede each act of the play; however, the films were never finished. (The Too Much Johnson footage was believed to have been destroyed by fire in 1970; however, it was rediscovered, restored, and premiered in 2013.)

At the same time, Welles was making inroads in radio. His radio career began early in 1934 with an excerpt from Panic. In 1935 he began appearing regularly on The March of Time news series, and subsequent radio roles included the part of Lamont Cranston in the mystery series The Shadow. In 1938 the Mercury players undertook a series of radio dramas adapted from famous novels. They attained national notoriety with a program based on H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds; the performance on October 30, using the format of a simulated news broadcast narrated by Welles, announced an attack on New Jersey by invaders from Mars. (However, contemporary reports that the program caused a nationwide panic were exaggerated.)

The national coverage that resulted from his theatre and radio work brought Welles’s name before Hollywood. In 1939 he signed an extraordinary contract with RKO that guaranteed him near-total autonomy and final cut on any film he made. For his first film, Welles chose Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which was to be filmed entirely from the point of view of the narrator Marlow. However, despite months of preparation, the film never got off the ground. Welles narrated Swiss Family Robinson (1940) while waiting for another project to evolve.

born

May 6, 1915
Kenosha, Wisconsin

died

October 10, 1985 (aged 70)
Los Angeles, California

Orson From Match Game Rules

notable works

• Grammy Award (1981)
• Grammy Award (1978)
• Grammy Award (1976)
• Honorary Oscar (1971)
• Academy Award (1971)
• Academy Award (1942)

founder of

Match Game 77 Orson Bean

• spouse Rita Hayworth

related facts and data