Bob Dorian — host for historic movies on AMC

Bob Dorian, who displayed his lifelong zest for old Hollywood films as the easygoing prime-time host of the American Movie Classics cable channel for nearly two decades, died June 15. He was 85.

His daughter Melissa Parish confirmed the death but did not specify the cause or say where he died. He had been living in Palm Coast, Fla.

Dorian was the undisputed star of AMC from 1984 to around 2000, before the channel changed its focus to original series like “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.” He preceded by a decade the arrival of Robert Osborne as the popular host at rival channel Turner Classic Movies. Osborne died in 2017.

Working from a cozy set with a smattering of Hollywood trinkets, Dorian introduced films from the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, offering anecdotes of revered classics, B-movies and serials.

He told stories — how director Frank Capra had pitched James Stewart on starring in “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946), the trouble Orson Welles had wearing the peg leg he used when he portrayed Long John Silver in “Treasure Island” (1972).

Dorian was more a well-informed fan than a movie historian.

“The reason they hired me,” he told The Washington Post in 1998, “is there aren’t too many films that I don’t like. I can say something good about most of them.”

Dorian was an actor and magician whose role as Dracula in a commercial for a video game in the early 1980s led to the AMC job. The producer of the commercial, who had moved on to AMC, suggested that Dorian audition for the host job.

“I never realized it was going to last 10 years,” he told The Herald-News of New Jersey in 1994.

“He was unequivocally the face of AMC,” Joshua Sapan, president and chief executive of AMC Networks, said in a phone interview.

Robert Paul Vierengel (he...