NEW YORK – Regis Philbin, the genial host who shared his life with TV viewers over morning coffee for decades and helped himself and some fans strike it rich with the game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," died Friday at 88.
Philbin died of natural causes Friday night, just over a month before his 89th birthday, his family said.
Celebrities routinely stopped by Philbin's eponymous syndicated morning show, but its heart was in the first 15 minutes, when he and co-host Kathie Lee Gifford — on "Live! with Regis and Kathie Lee" from 1985-2000 — or Kelly Ripa — on "Live! with Regis and Kelly" from 2001 until his 2011 retirement — bantered about the events of the day. Viewers laughed at Philbin's mock indignation over not getting the best seat at a restaurant the night before, or being henpecked by his wife.
"Even I have a little trepidation," he told the Associated Press in 2008, when asked how he does a show every day. "You wake up in the morning and you say, 'What did I do last night that I can talk about? What's new in the paper? How are we gonna fill that 20 minutes?'"
Ripa and her current TV partner, Ryan Seacrest, called Philbin "the ultimate class act, bringing his laughter and joy into our homes every day."
The tributes flooding in over social media read like blurbs for a movie Philbin would promote: "Always made me laugh" — Tony Bennett. "One of a kind" — Henry Winkler. "A lovely man" — Rosie O'Donnell. "His wit was only surpassed by his huge heart" — Meredith Vieira.
After hustling into an entertainment career by parking cars at a Los Angeles TV station, Philbin logged more than 15,000 hours on the air, earning him recognition in the Guinness World Records for the most broadcast hours logged by a TV personality, a record previously held by Hugh Downs.
He was host of the prime-time game show, "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," briefly TV's most popular show at the turn of the century. ABC aired the family-friendly program as often as five times a week. It generated around $1 billion in revenue in its first two years — ABC had said it was the most profitable show in TV history — and helped make Philbin himself a millionaire many times over.
