Alex Trebek, the beloved host of the TV game show Jeopardy! has died at the age of 80. With apologies to the show’s signature question response format, most everyone knows the answer: Who is Alex Trebek?
Trebek was honored with five Daytime Emmy awards for Outstanding Game Show Host. In 2011, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences bestowed on him its Lifetime Achievement Award. He also holds a Guinness World Records benchmark for Most Game Show Episodes Hosted by the Same Presenter (nearly 8,000). In 2012, Jeopardy! was honored with a Peabody Award, the first time in half a century that the august organization honored a game show.
But his iconic stature was burnished by Will Ferrell’s portrayal of him in one of Saturday Night Live’s most popular recurring sketches, “Celebrity Jeopardy!,” in which Ferrell’s long-suffering Trebek contended with hilariously dense celebrities who could not answer the simplest questions (“This ‘G’ shaped letter comes between ‘F’ and ‘H’”).
When asked in 2012 by The Hollywood Reporter about his reaction to the sketches, he responded, “Oh, I loved them.” In 2002, he made a cameo appearance during the sketch on Ferrell’s last episode as a cast member.
Born on July 22, 1940, Trebek was a native of Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1998. He began his broadcasting career in the early 1960s with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In 1973, he came to Los Angeles and that year hosted the NBC game show, The Wizard of Odds. He later served as host in a succession of game shows that did not last a season, including, Double Dare, The New High Rollers, The $128,000 Question and Pitfall.
But it was as the host of Jeopardy! that he became one of pop culture’s most recognizable and beloved figures. Created in 1964 by Merv Griffin, Jeopardy! had a unique format by which contestants were given clues presented as answers and they responded in the form of a question. The original series ran until 1975. The syndicated series reboot with Trebek as its unflappable host premiered in 1984. The show, noted the Peabody committee, was “a model of integrity and decorum,” and award-worthy for “consistently encouraging, celebrating and rewarding knowledge of this, that and the other.”
Trebek was an avuncular presence. “People think because I’m the host of a fairly serious, intelligence-based quiz show that I must know all the answers,” he reflected in a 2018 interview with New York Magazine’s Vulture website. “I do — because they’re written on a sheet of paper in front of me.” When asked if he was aware that he conveyed a disappointed vibe when contestants got perceived easy questions wrong, he admitted, “It’s a reaction — but I know that ‘You’ve disappointed daddy’ is a tone I’m striking. It’s also, ‘How can you not get this? This is not rocket science.’”
In 2018, he signed a contract extension that would have him hosting through the 2021-22 season. In an interview with the Associated Press, he mused about retirement. “It’s not as if I’m overworked,” he said with characteristic modesty. “We tape 46 days a year.” But after more than 50 years as a game show host, he acknowledged, “I’m slowing down. I will (retire) someday, when I feel I’ve lost enough of my abilities and am messing up a little too much, or it’s no longer any fun. And it’s still fun.”
Ken Jennings, who in 2004 won 74 Jeopardy! games in a row, the longest winning streak in game show history, compared Trebek to news anchor Walter Cronkite in a 2019 tweet, calling him an “authoritative, reassuring TV voice you hear every night, almost to the point of ritual.” Reader’s Digest ranked Trebek among the top 10 most trusted people in America (he was No. 8).
Trebek suffered heart attacks in 2007 and 2012. In January 2018, he announced in a video that following a fall, he’d undergone surgery for blood clots on the brain. Jeopardy! never taped an episode without him, save one April Fool’s prank in which he and Wheel of Fortune Pat Sajak hosted each other’s shows.
On March 6, 2019, Trebek released a video in which he announced he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer. “I’m going to fight this and I’m going to keep working,” he said. “I plan to beat the low survival rate statistics for this disease. “ He jokingly added, “Truth told I have to because under the terms of my contract I have to host Jeopardy! for three more years.”
On Sept.17, 2019, Trebek announced on Good Morning America that he would undergo another round of chemotherapy. “This past summer we thought I was finished with chemo,” he said. “That was a bit premature and certainly overly optimistic.” He revealed that his immunotherapy had not taken. His numbers “went south, dramatically and quickly,” he said.
This was a setback from just the previous month when he announced that he was “on the mend” and done with treatment. “I was doing so well and my numbers went down to the equivalent of a normal human being who does not have pancreatic cancer, so we were all very optimistic,” according to a report Us Weekly.”
Trebek was married for almost 30 years to Jean Currivan, who was 24 years his junior, leading Trebek to joke to People magazine in 2019, “If I’d just met Jean in my 20s we could have had a longer life together… I guess if I’d met her when I was in my 20s she wouldn’t have been born yet.”
In The Hollywood Reporter interview, he reflected on Jeopardy!’s legacy: “Appreciation for the learning process. An appreciation for curiosity, wanting to know more. That’s very important. We keep hearing about the problems with our education system in the United States, how we do not measure up to kids in other lands. Well, we can overcome that very quickly in all subjects if the children are encouraged to use their imaginations and their sense of curiosity and probe into different areas.”
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