Art Carney, who won an Oscar for "Harry and Tonto" but is best remembered as Jackie Gleason's sewer-worker pal Ed Norton on "The Honeymooners, " has died. He was 85.
Carney, a versatile stage, screen and television actor who was equally adept at comedy and drama, died in Chester, Conn., on Sunday and was buried on Tuesday after a small, private funeral. He had been ill for some time.
Carney won his Academy Award for best actor in the 1974 film playing Harry, a retired teacher and widower who sets off on a cross-country journey with Tonto, his cat, after his New York apartment building is torn down.
ART CARNEY 1918-2003 / Comic actor collected Oscar, Emmys
November 12, 2003|By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times
Art Carney (second from left) and co-stars Jackie Gleason, Audrey Meadows and Joyce Randolph appear in a scene from the 1950s series "The Honeymooners.'' Associated Press File Photo
Art Carney, who won an Oscar for "Harry and Tonto" but is best remembered as Jackie Gleason's sewer-worker pal Ed Norton on "The Honeymooners, " has died. He was 85.
Carney, a versatile stage, screen and television actor who was equally adept at comedy and drama, died in Chester, Conn., on Sunday and was buried on Tuesday after a small, private funeral. He had been ill for some time.
Carney won his Academy Award for best actor in the 1974 film playing Harry, a retired teacher and widower who sets off on a cross-country journey with Tonto, his cat, after his New York apartment building is torn down.
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But even after winning Hollywood's top acting prize for his first starring film role, Carney said people still greeted him with, "How are things down in the sewer?"
"Not that I ever regret playing Ed Norton," said Carney, who got his acting start on radio in the early 1940s and made his TV debut in 1948.
There's no denying the impact Norton, the self-described "subterranean sanitation engineer," had on Carney's career.
"He was the show, because he was so inventive," comedian Sid Caesar, who worked with Carney on several TV specials, said Tuesday. "I admired him very, very much. He was a huge talent."
He won Emmys for best supporting actor in 1953, 1954 and 1955 playing Norton in "The Honeymooners" sketches on "The Jackie Gleason Show." As Carney said decades later, "I brought the sewer worker to life."
Clad in his trademark T-shirt, open vest and beat-up felt hat with the upturned brim -- a hat Carney paid $5 for in 1935 while still in high school
-- he became one of the most memorable second bananas in TV history.
Carney viewed the lovable, dim-bulb Norton and blustery bus driver Ralph Kramden as a Brooklyn version of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
One classic Norton moment came when Ralph was trying to learn to play golf and Norton read from a book on how to execute a proper swing: "First step up, plant your feet firmly and address the ball."
Norton stood up, planted his feet firmly, offered an arm-waving salute and said, "Hellooooo ball!"
Arthur William Matthew Carney was born Nov. 4, 1918, in Mount Vernon, N.Y. , the youngest of six sons of newspaperman-publicist Edward Carney and Helen Carney.
Although quiet and introverted, Carney was a born mimic who by grammar school was entertaining family members with his impressions of everyone from Edward G. Robinson and Jimmy Durante to Franklin D. Roosevelt. His impressions were so good that, after graduating from high school in 1937, he was hired to join the Horace Heidt band.
In 1940, while still with the band, Carney married his high school sweetheart, Jean Myers, with whom he had three children: Eileen, Brian and Paul.
While working with Heidt, Carney also began drinking -- something that would later cause problems in both his personal and professional life, as would bouts of depression.
Carney quit the Heidt band in 1941 after showing up too drunk to announce the radio show. His condition became all too apparent when he couldn't spell TUMS, the sponsor's name, on the air. He quit before being fired at the sponsor's insistence.
Art Matthew Carney worked his way back to a slew of radio acting jobs on soap operas, comedies, dramas and children's shows.
In 1948, he joined "The Morey Amsterdam Show," playing Charlie, the dumb doorman in the program's New York nightclub setting. Carney made his television debut later that year when the show moved from CBS Radio to the DuMont television network, and the scene-stealing character gave him his first taste of TV fame. In 1950, he began his association with Gleason, the new host of "Cavalcade of Stars," a big-budget comedy-variety show on the DuMont network.
Arthur Matthew Carney originally played dozens of walk-on roles and character parts in Gleason sketches. He then began playing regular characters such as Sedgwick Van Gleason, the monocled and goateed father of millionaire Reggie Van Gleason;
and Clem Finch, the long-suffering milquetoast who was verbally abused by Gleason's "Loudmouth" Charlie Bratton.
"The Honeymooners" sketches were introduced in 1951.
When Gleason moved his variety show to CBS in 1952, "The Honeymooners" became the show's main sketch for the next three years. "The Honeymooners" then ran as a 39-episode, half-hour series from 1955 to 1956 before returning as a sketch for one season on the new "Jackie Gleason Show."
Not wanting to be "typed as a second banana or stooge," Carney demonstrated his acting range during and after his Gleason years by appearing in numerous dramatic productions.
By 1965, despite his success in Neil Simon's hit Broadway play "The Odd Couple," playing the meticulous Felix Unger opposite Walter Matthau's slovenly Oscar Madison, Carney was on a personal downward slide.
That October, Art Matthew Carney, suffering what he later called a mental and physical breakdown, dropped out of "The Odd Couple" and checked into a psychiatric center in Hartford, Conn.
[Arthur Matthew Carney.]
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