Charles Nelson Reilly

About

Charles Nelson Reilly (January 13, 1931 – May 25, 2007) was an American actor, comedian, director and drama teacher. He performed in the original Broadway casts of Bye Bye Birdie; Hello, Dolly!; and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical. His television credits include The Ghost & Mrs. Muir and Match Game. A recording of his autobiographical one-man play Save It for the Stage: The Life of Reilly was adapted into a 2006 independent film.

Reilly was born January 13, 1931, in New York City in the Bronx, to an Irish-Catholic father and a Swedish Lutheran mother. When young, he would amuse himself by creating puppet theater, and his mother often told him to “save it for the stage”.
In 1944, at age 13, Reilly was at a circus in Hartford, Connecticut before it caught fire and killed 167 people. Because of the event’s trauma, he was afraid of sitting in an audience, the large crowds reminding him of what happened that day. As he often stated on The Tonight Show and other such venues, he rarely attended plays—even when directing a play or stage production, he preferred to sit at the back of the house…