Regis Philbin, the iconic television personality best-known for his hosting duties on “Live! with Regis and Kelly” and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” passed away today at the age of 88.

A New York native, Regis Francis Xavier Philbin was born on August 25, 1931. He was named after his father’s alma mater, Manhattan’s Regis High School. Philbin graduated from Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx before going on to Notre Dame, where he majored in sociology.

After college, Philbin joined the U.S. Navy. He then embarked on his decades-long career in television as a stagehand and a delivery boy for a station in Los Angeles, Calif. Quickly after, he became a news writer and was offered a job as a sportscaster.

Philbin went on to San Diego as a news anchor for KOGO-TV. His first shot at national exposure came a few years later as the sidekick to Joey Bishop on ABC’s “The Joey Bishop Show.” Philbin then moved on to KHJ-TV in Los Angeles where he hosted “That Regis Philbin Show.” The show was canceled due to ratings powerhouse Johnny Carson but it brought Philbin to the midwest for “Regis Philbin’s Saturday Night in St. Louis.”

After three years of commuting to St. Louis each week for a Saturday night show, Philbin became a star in morning television — first in Los Angeles, then in New York. In 1985, he teamed with Kathie Lee Johnson, a year before she married former football star Frank Gifford, and the show went national in 1988.

Celebrities routinely stopped by Philbin’s eponymous syndicated morning show, but its heart was in the first 15 minutes, when he and co-host Kathie Lee Gifford — on “Live! with Regis and Kathie Lee” from 1985-2000 — or Kelly Ripa — on “Live! with Regis and Kelly” from 2001 until his 2011 retirement — bantered about the events of the day. Viewers laughed at Philbin’s mock indignation over not getting the best seat at a restaurant the night before, or being henpecked by his partner.

“Even I have a little trepidation,” he said back in 2008, when asked how he does a show every day. “You wake up in the morning and you say, ‘What did I do last night that I can talk about? What’s new in the paper? How are we gonna fill that 20 minutes?’” “I’m not gonna say it always works out brilliantly, but somehow we connect more often than we don’t,” he added.

He was host of the prime-time game show, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” briefly television’s most popular show at the turn of the century. ABC aired the family-friendly program as often as five times a week. It generated around $1 billion in revenue in its first two years — ABC had said it was the more profitable show in TV history — and helped make Philbin himself a millionaire many times over.

Philbin’s question to contestants, “Is that your final answer?” became a national catchphrase. He was even a fashion trendsetter; he put out a line of monochramactic shirts and ties to match what he wore on the set.

“You wait a lifetime for something like that and sometimes it never happens,” Philbin said in 1999.

After hustling into an entertainment career, Philbin logged more than 15,000 hours on the air, earning him recognition in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most broadcast hours logged by a TV personality, a record previously held by Hugh Downs.

Even though the series “Regis Philbin’s Health Styles,” on Lifetime in the 1980s, was part of his lengthy resume, Philbin had health issues. Doctors performed an angioplasty to relieve a blocked artery in 1993. He underwent bypass surgery in 2007 at age 75.

He’s survived by his wife, Joy, and their daughters J.J. and Joanna Philbin, as well as his daughter Amy Philbin with his first wife, Catherine Faylen.