Their son Art was a varsity letterman football player at James Monroe High School in New York City,[2] standing 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m), weighing 220 pounds (100 kg).

Fleming was a World War II veteran who served in the U.S. Navy for three and a half years as the pilot of a patrol bomber in the Atlantic.

[2] After leaving the navy, Fleming became an announcer at a radio station in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.

[4] His first television role was as a stunt double for Ralph Bellamy in the detective series Man Against Crime.

He also played attorney Jeremy Pitt in The Californians, an NBC Western set in San Francisco during the gold rush of the 1850s.

Fleming also appeared in many television commercials, in addition to anchoring the eleven o’clock news on WNBC.

Rather than describe him as the "host" of the program, announcer Don Pardo introduced him by saying, "and here's the star of Jeopardy!, Art Fleming".

As "the world's greatest quiz show's" first host, Fleming earned two Emmy Award nominations.

Because he hosted a quiz show, and in part because he was an avid reader with multiple college degrees, Fleming earned a reputation as being a storehouse of trivia.

in the 1982 movie Airplane II: The Sequel and in "Weird Al" Yankovic's music video "I Lost on Jeopardy".

[7] As a result, Alex Trebek (a personal friend of Fleming's)[8] took the position instead and continued to host the program until his death in 2020.

[9] In interviews conducted in the early years of the Trebek version, he stated that he disliked the show's new direction and the various changes that the revival's producers had made.

He disapproved of moving production from his native New York to Los Angeles, suggesting to a Sports Illustrated journalist in 1989 that filming in California made the show feel superficial and anti-intellectual: [Fleming] hates the glitz, the polish.

[2][8] On Sunday evenings, he occasionally co-hosted Trivia Spectacular with David Strauss, a St. Louis schoolteacher.

[12] They had a daughter Jan.[13] In 1954 he married actress Peggy Ann Ellis, who worked on The Merv Griffin Show.