ROME (AP) — Mike Bongiorno, a television host who popularized quiz shows for generations of Italians and became a symbol of national television, died on Monday at his home in Monte Carlo. He was 85.

The cause was a heart attack, the ANSA news agency and satellite television station Sky Italia said.

Mr. Bongiorno was among the first and most prominent personalities to move from state television to private television, contributing to the success of Mediaset S.p.A., the television company owned by Silvio Berlusconi, now the Italian prime minister, in the early 1980s.

Mr. Bongiorno had appeared on RAI state television on its first day of programming in the early 1950s and went on to host a series of successful quiz shows — many of them adaptations of American shows — for more than two decades. Millions of Italians watched as he asked sometimes impossible questions of his contestants.

Nicknamed the Quiz King, Mr. Bongiorno was one of Italy’s most enduring and beloved television personalities.

He was so popular that Umberto Eco wrote an essay called the “Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno,” using him as a symbol of popular culture.

Born in New York, Mr. Bongiorno moved to his mother’s hometown, Turin, Italy, as a boy. During World War II he took part in the Italian resistance and was briefly in a German concentration camp before being freed as part of a prisoner-of-war exchange, ANSA said.

Mr. Bongiorno appeared as himself in a handful of Italian movies, received an honorary degree in Milan and wrote an autobiography called “La Mia Versione” (“My Version”).

He recently left Mr. Berlusconi’s company and was working on a remake of his popular show “Rischiatutto” for Sky Italia.

Mr. Bongiorno is survived by his wife, Daniela Zuccoli, and three children.

Source: nytimes.com