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Chuck Woolery, the enigmatic game show host best known as the original presenter of Wheel of Fortune and Love Connection, has died aged 83.
Mark Young, Woolery’s friend and the co-host of their podcast, said on X/Twitter that Woolery had died at his home in Texas and that life would “not be the same without him”.
“It is with a broken heart that I tell you that my dear brother @chuckwoolery has just passed away. Life will not be the same without him, RIP brother,” he wrote. No statements have been shared from Woolery’s family at the time of publication.
Woolery was the first host of the long-running game show Wheel of Fortune when it premiered on NBC in January 1975. He earnt a Daytime Emmy award for his role on the show.
He fronted the programme for six years but left after asking for a pay rise to match the earnings of other top gameshow hosts. NBC reportedly did not oblige, and Woolery was replaced with Pat Sajak.
Woolery went on to host as the matchmaker on Fox’s Love Connection, a dating game show in which singles attempt to match with a compatible partner, presenting more than 2,000 episodes between 1983 and 1994. According to a 1986 article in People, the show was drawing in 4.5 million viewers per day and grossing $25m per year.
Woolery went on to host his own short-lived CBS daytime morning show, co-hosted the Family Channel’s Home and Family, and fronted other gameshows including Lingo on the Game Network, Greed on Fox and a rebooted syndication show, The Dating Game.
Charles Herbert Woolery was born in 1941 in Ashland, Kentucky, to Dan and Katherine Woolery. He attended the University of Kentucky for a brief period before dropping out to serve in the US Navy. After two years, he left to study economics at Morehead State University.
In his twenties, Woolery started to pursue a career in the music industry with the pop duo The Avant Garde, and charted with a top 40 hit, the 1968 song “Naturally Stoned”.
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They released three singles with Columbia Records, also including “Yellow Beads” and “Fly with Me!” but they disbanded and never released a full album after the latter single was made.
Following his successful game show hosting stint, Woolery later became a vocal conservative commentator, and referred to himself as a “Hollywood Conservative”.
In 2012, he launched a radio show called Save Us Chuck Woolery, which was later turned into the podcast Blunt Force Truth, which he hosted with Young. Woolery was a vocal supporter of Donald Trump and called the committee that investigated the 2021 attack on the Capitol a “witch hunt.”
