Charles Nelson Reilly
Charles Nelson Reilly is an actor, born 1931.
Reilly won a Tony Award and then spent thirty years being famous for something else entirely. The award was Best Featured Actor in a Musical, for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and he was in the original Broadway casts of Bye Bye Birdie and Hello, Dolly! as well. Born in the Bronx in 1931, he was a genuine theatre man: an actor, a director and a drama teacher, and the stage was the part of it he took most seriously.
American television wanted something narrower. He became a fixture of the game-show era, above all on Match Game, where the job was to sit in a box and be witty on demand for years at a stretch, and where the ascot and the enormous glasses became a larger public fact than any performance he ever gave. He was also Claymore Gregg on The Ghost & Mrs. Muir and a regular guest with Carson on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
The third act was animation, and it suited him exactly. That precise, fussy, faintly wounded voice made him a Don Bluth regular: Killer in All Dogs Go to Heaven and again in An All Dogs Christmas Carol and All Dogs Go To Heaven: The Series, Hunch in Rock-A-Doodle, Llort in A Troll in Central Park. He also worked on Goof Troop, The Pink Panther and Babes in Toyland.
Late on he wrote a one-man show about his own life, Save It for the Stage: The Life of Reilly, which was filmed and released in 2006. He died in 2007.
Movies (9)
TV (20)
- The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962)
- The Merv Griffin Show (1962)
- Match Game (1973)
- Dinah! (1974)
- Goof Troop (1992)
- The Pink Panther (1993)
- Evening Shade (1990)
- The Flintstone Comedy Show (1980)
- The Patty Duke Show (1963)
- Body Language (1984)
- Out of This World (1987)
- Madame's Place (1982)
- The New Dick Van Dyke Show (1971)
- Wordplay (1986)
- All Dogs Go To Heaven: The Series (1996)
- The Ghost & Mrs. Muir (1968)
- The New WKRP in Cincinnati (1991)
- Second Noah (1996)
- Arnie (1970)
- The 5 Mrs. Buchanans (1994)
Where to start with Charles Nelson Reilly
All Dogs Go to Heaven is where most people should start, because Killer is the purest distillation of what he did: a nervous, servile little henchman played with immaculate comic timing and audible theatrical training underneath it. Nothing else in the Don Bluth catalogue is quite so well cast.
Then The Ghost & Mrs. Muir, the acting credit worth taking seriously, a light supernatural sitcom where he plays Claymore Gregg and gets to build a whole character rather than a bit.
Match Game is the cultural artifact and it is genuinely worth an hour, because it preserves a loose, half-improvised style of daytime television that simply does not exist now, and he is the best thing in it.
After that, Rock-A-Doodle and A Troll in Central Park for more Bluth, Cannonball Run II for the strange one, and the filmed version of his one-man show if you want the man's own account, which is not among the credits listed here.