Chuck Woolery, the charismatic game show host who kicked off the long run Wheel of Fortune before playing matchmaker for 11 years Love connectionhas died. He was 83.

His friend and podcast co-host Mark Young said TMZ that Woolery died Saturday at his home in Texas, and he posted about it on X. Other details were not immediately available.

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Woolery got his start in show business as a singer in the orchestral pop band The Avant-Garde, whose best-known song, “Naturally Stoned,” reached No. 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1968. theme song for his (very) short-lived reality series Game Show Network in 2003.

After the Kentucky native performed “Delta Dawn.” The Merv Griffin ShowGriffin offered him the chance to audition as the host of a new game show he had just developed called Shoppers bazaar. Woolery defeated the former Sunset strip 77 star Edd “Kookie” Byrnes for the job, and the new name Wheel of Fortune premiered on NBC on January 6, 1975.

When the show landed a 44 share in 1981, Woolery asked for a raise from $65,000 a year to about $500,000, what other top game show hosts were making at the time, he recalled in 2007. Griffin offered him $400,000 and NBC said it would be pony. finished the rest, but that somehow enraged Griffin, who threatened to take it away Wheel of Fortune to CBS, according to Woolery.

Not wanting to lose the game show, NBC withdrew the offer, and Griffin proceeded to fire Woolery and hire Pat Sajak. Also let go: original letter turner Susan Stafford, who was replaced by Vanna White.

Woolery noted that Griffin “wanted to get the best out of me” and said the two never spoke again before Griffin died of prostate cancer in 2007.

However, Woolery recovered quite well with the syndicate Love connectionwho helmed more than 2,000 episodes of that show from 1983 to 1994. By 1986, he was making $1 million a year hosting that and NBC’s Scrabbleaccording to a 1986 article in People. (That year the magazine noted: Love connection grossed $25 million per year and attracted 4.5 million viewers per day.)

Woolery also had his own CBS daytime morning show, which he did not compete with for long Live with Regis and Kathie Lee; the Family Channel’s co-host Home and family; and was the face of other game shows including Language use on the Game Show Network, Greed on Fox and rebooted The Dating game for syndication.

Charles Herbert Woolery was born on March 16, 1941 in Ashland, Kentucky. His father, Dan, owned a fountain supplies business, and his mother, Katherine, was a homemaker.

He briefly attended the University of Kentucky before dropping out to serve in the U.S. Navy for a few years, then studied economics at Morehead State University while working a sales job at Pillsbury. He left school again, this time to pursue a career in music in Nashville, and he and singer-guitarist Elkin “Bubba” Fowler formed The Avant-Garde in 1967, signing with Columbia Records.

After The Avant-Garde failed, Woolery continued as a solo artist, and with the help of comedian Jonathan Winters, appeared on The tonight show in 1972. He also landed a gig as Mr. Dingle, an elderly postal worker and storekeeper, on the syndicated children’s show New zoo review and guest starred Love, American style.

In 1974 he appeared with then wife Jo Ann Pflug in the short film Sonic Boom and stars Cheryl Ladd and Rosey Grier in the feature film The treasure of Jamaica Reef and was a featured vocalist on a new version of Your Hit Parade.

He earned a Daytime Emmy in 1978 for his work on Wheel of Fortune.

On Love connectiona man or woman watched audition tapes of three potential partners and then selected one for a blind date. The show would foot the bill for their night out – $75 when the show first aired.

The couple couldn’t talk to each other about their date until they were interviewed by Woolery on the show a few weeks later to see how it went. The studio audience was asked to vote for which of the three people in the audition stage they thought would be the best match, and sometimes a second date would take place. Other times these two would never date again.

“This is really the only show I do that I will watch at home,” Woolery said in the People story. “I really like the unpredictability of it.”

For being Love connection trademark, Woolery told viewers that the program would return after the commercials in “two and two” – two minutes and two seconds, the length of the break at the time – and had a hand gesture to do so.

In 1993, Entertainment weekly asked Woolery if he would “ever have gay couples” on the show.

“No,” he replied. “You think it would work if a guy sat down and I said, ‘Well, where did you meet and so and so?’ then I get to the end of the date and say, “Did you kiss?” Give me a break. Do you think America will broadly identify with that? I don’t think that works at all.”

More recently, Woolery, an avid fisherman, co-hosted the right-wing podcast with Young Blunt force truth.

He was married four times, including to Pflug from 1972 to 1980; to music director Teri Nelson Carpenter, granddaughter of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, from 1985-2004; and to Kim Barnes, whom he married in 2006 – and had or raised eight children/stepchildren.

The best of The Hollywood Reporter

Sign up for the THR newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.