Richard Dawson: Family Feud Then and Now 2026 | He Kissed 20,000 Women and Married One 😱

Richard Dawson kissed roughly twenty thousand women on Family Feud, and one of them became his wife. This is the Family Feud host then and now, the full arc from a bombed-out Royal Navy town in England to the highest paid face in American daytime television, and everything that happened after the applause stopped. He was born Colin Lionel Emm in Gosport in 1932, evacuated out of the bombing as a small boy, and by his own account he attended school regularly for only about two years in his entire life. At fourteen he lied about his age and went to sea with the British Merchant Navy, boxing other crewmen for money on the decks. London comedy clubs came next, then marriage to the British film star Diana Dors, six years as Corporal Newkirk on Hogan's Heroes, and finally the game show that made him a household fixture when Family Feud premiered in 1976. We look at the kissing that advertisers begged him to stop, the phone call from Hawaii that pushed his salary past two million dollars a year, and the tearful goodbye he could not get through when the original run ended in 1985. We follow Gretchen Johnson, the twenty-five-year-old contestant who walked onto his stage in 1981 and stayed beside him for thirty-one years, and we find out where his children Mark, Gary and Shannon are today. We also tell the truth about how he tragically passed away in 2012, and about the small patch of Los Angeles grass where he was laid to rest a few steps from Bob Crane, the man who beat him to the lead role in Hogan's Heroes. Where are they now, who's still alive, and what really happened to the man behind that survey board. Tell us in the comments whether you were watching on that afternoon in 1985, and subscribe for a new story every week.