62 Facts About Chevy Chase

1.

Cornelius Crane "Chevy" Chase is an American comedian, actor and writer.

2.

Chevy Chase became a key cast member in the first season of Saturday Night Live, where his recurring Weekend Update segment became a staple of the show.

3.

Chevy Chase played Irwin "Fletch" Fletcher in Fletch and its sequel Fletch Lives.

4.

Chevy Chase has hosted the Academy Awards twice and briefly had his own late-night talk show, The Chevy Chase Show.

5.

Chevy Chase played Pierce Hawthorne on the NBC sitcom Community from 2009 to 2012.

6.

Cornelius Crane Chevy Chase was born in Lower Manhattan on October 8,1943, and grew up in Woodstock, New York.

7.

Chevy Chase's father, Edward Tinsley "Ned" Chase, was a Princeton-educated Manhattan book editor and magazine writer.

8.

Chevy Chase's mother, Cathalene Parker, was a concert pianist and librettist, whose father, Rear Admiral Miles Browning, served as Admiral Raymond A Spruance's Chief of Staff on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise at the Battle of Midway in World War II.

9.

Chevy Chase's mother, named Cathalene, was an opera singer who performed several times at Carnegie Hall.

10.

Chevy Chase is a 14th-generation New Yorker, and was listed in the Social Register at an early age.

11.

Chevy Chase disdained the pretension of his mother's side of the family, as embodied by her mother, Cattie.

12.

Chevy Chase's parents divorced when he was four; his father remarried into the Folgers coffee family, and his mother remarried twice.

13.

Chevy Chase has stated that he grew up in an upper middle class environment and that his adoptive maternal grandfather did not bequeath any assets to Chase's mother when he died.

14.

Chevy Chase was educated at Riverdale Country School, an independent day school in the Riverdale neighborhood of The Bronx, New York City, before being expelled.

15.

Chevy Chase ultimately graduated as valedictorian in 1962 from the Stockbridge School, an independent boarding school in the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

16.

Chevy Chase transferred to Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where he studied a pre-med curriculum and graduated in 1967 with a Bachelor of Arts in English.

17.

Chevy Chase did not enter medical school, which meant he was subject to the military draft.

18.

Chevy Chase was not drafted, and when he appeared in January 1989 as the first guest of the just-launched late-night The Pat Sajak Show, he said he had "convinced" his draft board he deserved a 4-F classification by "'falsely' claiming, among other things, that he had homosexual tendencies".

19.

Chevy Chase played drums with the college band The Leather Canary, headed by school friends Walter Becker and Donald Fagen.

20.

Chevy Chase has called the group "a bad jazz band"; Becker and Fagen later founded the successful group Steely Dan.

21.

Chevy Chase played drums and keyboards for a rock band called Chamaeleon Church, which recorded one album for MGM Records before disbanding in 1969.

22.

Chevy Chase was a member of an early underground comedy ensemble called Channel One, which he co-founded in 1967.

23.

Chevy Chase wrote a one-page spoof of Mission: Impossible for Mad magazine in 1970 and was a writer for the short-lived Smothers Brothers TV show comeback in the spring of 1975.

24.

Chevy Chase made the move to comedy as a full-time career by 1973, when he became a writer and cast member of The National Lampoon Radio Hour, a syndicated satirical radio series.

25.

Chevy Chase appeared in the movie The Groove Tube, which was directed by another co-founder of Channel One, Ken Shapiro, featuring several Channel One sketches.

26.

Chevy Chase was one of the original cast members of Saturday Night Live, NBC's late-night comedy television show, beginning in October 1975.

27.

In later years, Chevy Chase met and became friendly with President Ford.

28.

Chevy Chase claimed that his version of Weekend Update was the inspiration for later news satire shows such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

29.

Weekend Update was later revived as a segment on The Chevy Chase Show, a short-lived late-night talk show produced by Chase and broadcast by Fox Broadcasting Company.

30.

Chevy Chase was committed contractually to SNL for only one year as a writer and became a cast member during rehearsals just before the show's premiere.

31.

Chevy Chase received two Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe Award for his comedy writing and live comic acting on the show.

32.

In Rolling Stones February 2015 appraisal of all 141 SNL cast members to date, Chevy Chase was ranked tenth in overall importance.

33.

Chevy Chase acknowledged Ernie Kovacs's influence on his work in Saturday Night Live, and he thanked Kovacs during his acceptance speech for his Emmy Award.

34.

In late 1976, in the middle of the second season, Chevy Chase became the first member of the original cast to leave the show.

35.

Chevy Chase moved to Los Angeles, married Carlin, and was replaced by Bill Murray, although he made a few cameo appearances on the show during the second season.

36.

Chevy Chase hosted SNL eight times until 1997 when he was reportedly banned after hitting Cheri Oteri on the back of the head and harassing female writers.

37.

Chevy Chase participated in the 40th anniversary special in February 2015.

38.

Chevy Chase said in an interview that he chose to do Foul Play so he could do "real acting" for the first time in his career instead of just doing "schtick".

39.

Chevy Chase followed Foul Play with the successful Harold Ramis comedy Caddyshack, in 1980.

40.

Chevy Chase narrowly escaped death by electrocution during the filming of Modern Problems in 1980.

41.

Chevy Chase continued his film career in 1983's National Lampoon's Vacation, directed by Ramis and written by John Hughes.

42.

Chevy Chase married Jayni Luke in 1982, and in 1985 he starred in Fletch, which grossed over $50 million off an $8 million budget.

43.

Chevy Chase later co-starred with fellow SNL alum Dan Aykroyd in Spies Like Us.

44.

Chevy Chase appeared alongside Paul Simon, one of his best friends, in Simon's 1986 second video for "You Can Call Me Al", in which he lip-syncs all of Simon's lyrics.

45.

Chevy Chase played saxophone onstage at Simon's free concert at the Great Lawn in Central Park in the summer of 1991.

46.

In September 1993, Chase hosted The Chevy Chase Show, a weeknight talk show, for the Fox Broadcasting Company.

47.

Chevy Chase later appeared in a commercial for Doritos, airing during the Super Bowl, in which he made humorous reference to the show's failure.

48.

Chevy Chase was Hasty Pudding's 1993 Man of the Year, and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in that same year.

49.

Chevy Chase received The Harvard Lampoons Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996.

50.

Chevy Chase was roasted by the New York Friars Club for a Comedy Central television special in 2002.

51.

Chevy Chase returned to mainstream movie-making in 2006, co-starring with Tim Allen and Courteney Cox in the comedy Zoom, though it was both a critical and commercial failure.

52.

Chevy Chase appeared in a prominent recurring role as villainous software magnate Ted Roark on the NBC spy-comedy Chuck.

53.

In 2015, Chevy Chase reprised his role as Clark Griswold in the fifth Vacation installment, titled Vacation.

54.

Chevy Chase departed the show by mutual agreement with the network and his character was abruptly written out of the fourth season of Community.

55.

Chevy Chase's departure was cemented by the writers making the creative decision to kill off Pierce.

56.

Chevy Chase married Susan Hewitt in New York City on February 23,1973.

57.

Chevy Chase married his third wife, Jayni Luke, in Pacific Palisades on June 19,1982.

58.

In 1986, Chevy Chase was admitted to the Betty Ford Center for treatment of a prescription painkiller addiction.

59.

Chevy Chase's use began after he experienced ongoing back pain related to the pratfalls he took during his Saturday Night Live appearances.

60.

An active environmentalist and philanthropist, Chevy Chase holds liberal political views.

61.

Chevy Chase raised money for Bill Clinton in the 1990s; and for John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election.

62.

On September 23,1993, Chevy Chase received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7021 Hollywood Blvd.