RICHARD Dawson, the wisecracking British entertainer who was among the schemers in the 1960s sitcom Hogan's Heroes has died at 79.

Dawson, best known to TV fans as the Cockney POW Corporal Peter Newkirk on Hogan's Heroes, died on Saturday night from complications related to oesophageal cancer at Ronald Reagan Memorial hospital, his son Gary said.

After Hogan's Heroes, Dawson became host of the game show Family Feud, which pitted families who tried to guess the most popular answers to poll questions such as "What do people give up when they go on a diet?"

Dawson won a daytime Emmy Award in 1978 as best game show host.

Tom Shales of The Washington Post called him "the fastest, brightest and most beguilingly caustic interlocutor since the late great Groucho bantered and parried on You Be Your Life."

Dawson was known for kissing each woman contestant, and at the time the show bowed out in 1985, executive producer Howard Felsher estimated he had kissed "somewhere in the vicinity of 20,000".

"I kissed them for luck and love, that's all," Dawson said at the time.

He reprised his game show character in a much darker mood in the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film The Running Man, playing the host of a deadly TV show set in a totalitarian future, where convicts try to escape as their executioners stalk them.

Saturday Night Live mocked him in the 1970s, with Bill Murray portraying him as leering and nasty, even slapping one contestant (John Belushi) for getting too fresh.

The British-born actor already had gained fame as the fast-talking Newkirk in Hogan's Heroes, the comedy about prisoners in a Nazi POW camp who hoodwink their captors and run the place themselves.

Despite its unlikely premise, the show made the ratings top 10 in its first season, 1965-66, and ran until 1971.

According to the Internet Movie Database, Dawson was born Colin Lionel Emm in 1932 in Gosport, England.

His first wife was actress Diana Dors, the blonde bombshell who was Britain's answer to Marilyn Monroe.

Originally published as Hogan's Heroes actor Richard Dawson dies