Los Angeles
Hall, who was also a dedicated philanthropist, died of heart failure Saturday morning at his home in Los Angeles, according to his daughter Sharon Hall. “We knew this was going to happen — he was 96 — but you’re never prepared,” she said.
One of the most popular TV game shows of the 1960s and early 1970s, Let’s Make a Deal featured Hall as a fast-talking auctioneer-trader who randomly pulled people from the audience to trade for prizes that could be valuable — or relatively worthless “zonks,” gag gifts such as a barnyard animal or a giant jar of peanut butter.
“People had gotten excited on game shows before, but never to the extent that they did on Deal,” according to the 2006 book “Rules of the Game,” which featured Hall on the cover.
Let’s Make a Deal originally aired for 13 years, first on NBC and then ABC, and it has been revived in various daytime and prime-time incarnations since.
Over more than two decades, Hall hosted about 4,500 episodes and became wealthy co-producing it. When CBS revived the show in 2009, actor-comedian Wayne Brady stepped in as master of ceremonies. Hall served as a consultant and made the rare guest appearance.
A native of Canada, Hall moved to Los Angeles from New York in 1961 — the year he turned 40 — hoping to change his luck in broadcasting, he later said.
For five years, he had tried to break through on TV in New York but ended up mainly appearing on what he called “fringe stuff” that included narrating the NBC western anthology Cowboy Theatre in 1957. He finally broke through hosting the CBS game show Video Village, which emcee Jack Narz left early in its run in 1960. When production of the weekday game show moved west, so did Hall. In 1962, he sold Your First Impression, a game show that involved identifying a mystery guest, to NBC and met his future business partner, Stefan Hatos, a network employee.
Over lunch at a deli at Sunset Boulevard and Vine Avenue, Hatos and Hall came up with the idea for Let’s Make a Deal. It was inspired by The Lady, or the Tiger? the Frank R. Stockton short story about a person choosing between two curtain-draped tents, and The Auctioneer, a radio show that Hall had hosted in Toronto.
The show’s signature closing gave two contestants a choice between prizes hidden behind door number 1, 2 or 3. It spawned a controversy in the 1990s that became known as “the Monty Hall problem”: Why is it better for a contestant to switch choices after the contents of a door that was not picked are revealed?
Books were written about the probability puzzle that continues “to perplex world-class mathematicians,” according to The Guide to United States Popular Culture.
When interviewers questioned whether the show glorified greed, Hall invariably insisted it was about “gambling” or “risking.” “It was just people coming with nothing, and going home with something, whether a dining-room set or a goat,” Hall told The Jerusalem Post in 1993. “It had great entertainment value, that’s all.”
The show’s 50th anniversary was marked at the 2013 Daytime Entertainment Awards, which gave a spry 91-year-old Hall a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Hall raised almost $1 billion for charity, according to a biography by his alma mater, the University of Manitoba.
The son of a butcher, he was born Monte Halparin on Aug. 25, 1921, in Winnipeg, Canada, to Maurice and Rose Halparin. His Jewish grandparents had emigrated from Russia. After skipping a couple of grades, he graduated from high school at 14. Unable to afford college, he spent two years as a delivery boy for his father before his family cobbled together $150 to pay for a year at the University of Manitoba.
Halfway through his sophomore year, he ran out of money and was back home working at a clothing factory when the largesse of a stranger changed the course of his life. A local businessman offered to pay his college tuition if Hall maintained an “A” average and promised to do the same for someone else someday.
Hall returned to Manitoba as a pre-med student and earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and zoology in 1946. He failed to gain entrance to the college’s medical school, which limited the number of Jews accepted and twice denied him admission, according to the university biography. As president of the school’s student body, Hall helped lead a protest that eventually quashed the quota system, the biography said. But by then he had discovered show business, acting in university theater productions and hosting student variety shows.
In the early 1940s, Hall emceed Canadian Army shows. After World War II, he started out at a Winnipeg radio station before moving on to Toronto, where he met his future wife, actress Marilyn Plottel, his first night in town. They married in 1947.
At a Toronto radio station, his boss told him “Halparin” was too long so he shortened it to “Hall.” When his first name was misspelled as “Monty” in advertising, he “went with it,” Hall said in the 2002 archive interview.
Hall is survived by two daughters, Sharon Hall, a producer, and Joanna Gleason, an actress; a son, Richard Hall, a producer; and five grandchildren. His wife, Marilyn, an Emmy-winning producer, died June 5.