Charles Nelson Reilly
American comedian and actor (1931–2007)
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.
Early life
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 or the back of a balcony near the exits to preview his work, including one time where his leading lady's costume caught fire (but on recounting this episode to Johnny Carson, Reilly assured him "but you know, these things always work out okay.")
Reilly developed a love of opera and wanted to become an opera singer.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Charles Nelson Reilly” is american comedian and actor (1931–2007). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Charles, Nelson and Reilly, not as a finished interpretation.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1065627. VIAF identifies the subject as 61735679. The Library of Congress control number is n91105102. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1931, 2007, 2006 and 1944.
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This entry incorporates text from “Charles Nelson Reilly” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.