Art Carney, 85, Lauded 'Honeymooners' Actor, Dies
By Richard Severo Nov. 12, 2003
Art Carney, the Academy Award-winning comic actor who first gained fame as the guffawing, slightly off-center sewer worker Ed Norton in the early 1950's television series ''The Honeymooners,'' died on Sunday at a convalescent home in Chester, Conn. He was 85.
Mr. Carney's talents were by no means confined to ''The Honeymooners.'' He won an Oscar for his performance in the 1974 film ''Harry and Tonto,'' in which he portrays a widower who is evicted from his New York City apartment and who embarks on a cross-country odyssey with his pet cat. Over the course of his career he repeatedly won critical acclaim for the depth and breadth of his talent, even when he appeared in movies that critics did not like.
But it is as Ed Norton that he will be remembered by the many fans who have kept ''The Honeymooners'' in reruns for decades. Norton was no ordinary sewer worker. He called himself an ''underground sanitation expert.'' Every chance he got, he raided the refrigerator of his downstairs neighbor and friend Ralph Kramden, the irascible Brooklyn bus driver played by Jackie Gleason, and his appetite knew no bounds. Norton always wore a vest over his grungy T-shirt, wore a battered fedora indoors and out and always said the wrong thing at the wrong time.
Although Mr. Carney, who was painfully shy, would tell interviewers that he was the opposite of Norton and not at all like him in his personal habits, viewers sensed and his friends confirmed that he was more like Norton than he cared to say. Mr. Carney's stomach really was a bottomless pit, and he always took two helpings of everything, just as Norton did. For dessert, he would wolf down sundaes and chocolate bars. He had a keen sense of the absurd and relished the outlandish, but he always insisted that he had never been a comedian, only an actor.
Audrey Meadows, who played Alice Kramden on the show, summed him up as ''a genuinely nice guy'' and added, ''He hasn't got a nasty, conniving hair on his head.''
Arthur William Matthew Carney was born on Nov. 4, 1918, in Mount Vernon, N.Y., the youngest of six sons of Edward Michael and Helen Farrell Carney. He loved doing impersonations as a boy, won a talent contest in elementary school and another at A. B. Davis High School, in Mount Vernon, from which he graduated in 1936. He sought no further formal education and never took an acting course. Instead, he talked his way into a job with the popular Horace Heidt Orchestra and went on the road for more than three years, doing impersonations and novelty songs. He also did some announcing for Heidt's ''Pot O' Gold'' radio show. In 1941, when the orchestra was asked to make a movie called ''Pot O' Gold,'' Mr. Carney had a bit part.
Mr. Carney then left Heidt and tried nightclubs and vaudeville, but he was not very good at them and did not do well. He did succeed in getting bit parts on radio, specializing in roles that required dialects. One show, ''Man Behind the Gun,'' won a Peabody Award in 1942.
At one point a CBS executive who was looking for someone who could imitate the voice of Franklin D. Roosevelt was struck by Mr. Carney's ability and hired him. His career was interrupted by World War II. He was sent to France as an infantryman, but was wounded in the leg by shrapnel almost immediately and was hospitalized for nine months. He walked with a limp for the rest of his life.
In 1949 he appeared on a television show that starred the cello-playing comedian Morey Amsterdam. By 1951 he was a regular on ''Henry Morgan's Great Talent Hunt.''
It was in the early 1950's that Mr. Carney began shaping the character of Ed Norton. It happened for the first time in a skit on Mr. Gleason's ''Cavalcade of Stars,'' which was shown on the old DuMont network. When Mr. Gleason was beckoned by CBS, Mr. Carney went with him as second banana.
At first he played a variety of roles: the rabbit-like Clem Finch; Sedgwick Van Gleason, the aristocratic father of the wastrel son, Reggie Van Gleason (Mr. Gleason); and Ed Norton. They were all funny, but it was Norton who captured the hearts of a nation and soon Mr. Carney was being offered honorary memberships in associations of sewer workers in Texas, California and Florida. Look magazine assessed what he had done with the role of Norton and concluded that Mr. Carney ''brings to comedy all the deftness, imagination and pathos of yesterday's most eloquent loser, Charlie Chaplin.''
New Yorkers were convinced that Mr. Carney, because of his accent, was from Brooklyn, but he insisted that he learned to speak that way by listening to the people around him in the Westchester of his childhood. He spent much of his social life with the friends he made while he was growing up. Even after he became wealthy, he avoided social commitments with other stars, preferring to stay home.
His contract with Mr. Gleason allowed him to do some acting in television outside his Norton routine, and his performances were memorable, although few were repeated. Among them was his appearance in 1957 in ''The Fabulous Irishman,'' in which he played Robert Briscoe, a Jew who had been elected Mayor of Dublin, and in 1960 he performed in Thornton Wilder's ''Our Town'' as the philosophical New England Stage Manager. In 1960 he also appeared in ''Call Me Back,'' a one-man drama about a divorced alcoholic.
Mr. Carney also won praise for his work in a number of television dramas during the 1950's, for such series as ''Studio One,'' the ''Kraft Television Theater'' and ''Omnibus.''
Later on, he made guest appearances on ''Star Trek,'' ''The Defenders'' and ''All in the Family.''
His Broadway credits included ''The Rope Dancers,'' in which he co-starred with Siobhan McKenna in 1957. His films included ''The Greatest Show on Earth'' (1952), ''The Silencers'' (1966), ''Gambit'' (1966), ''The Venetian Affair'' (1967) and ''The Late Show'' (1977), in which he played an aging private detective in seedy Los Angeles.
In 1965 he appeared on Broadway in Neil Simon's comedy ''The Odd Couple,'' originating the role of the obsessively neat Felix Unger to Walter Matthau's slovenly Oscar Madison.
It was during his run in ''The Odd Couple'' that he had a breakdown over the end of his 25-year marriage to the former Jean Myers. He fought addictions to alcohol, amphetamines and barbiturates for years and had conquered them all by the time he made ''Harry and Tonto.''
After his divorce from Miss Myers, Mr. Carney married Barbara Isaac. When that marriage ended in divorce, he remarried his first wife. She survives him, as do their children, Eileen, Bryan and Paul.
Originally Mr. Carney did not want the role in ''Harry and Tonto'' because he thought that the film sentimentalized old age. Besides, he argued, he was only 55, not nearly old enough to play the 72-year-old title role. Paul Mazursky, the director, talked him into it by suggesting that this particular person was a young 72. Mr. Carney used his own voice, used little makeup, grew a mustache, whitened his hair and stopped masking his limp.
But he reached a new audience through reruns of ''The Honeymooners,'' still denying that he was actually like Norton.
''I love Ed Norton and what he did for my career,'' Mr. Carney once said. ''But the truth is that we couldn't have been more different. Norton was the total extrovert, there was no way you could put down his infectious good humor. Me? I'm a loner and a worrier.''
ADVERTISEMENT
BY
Looking for more information?
Amanda S. Stevenson 
