Art Carney - Wikipedia

Thanks for letting us know Maj Marty Hogan that today is the anniversary of the birth of actor in film, stage, television and radio Arthur William Matthew "Art" Carney
Art Carney is best known for playing sewer worker Ed Norton opposite Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden in the sitcom The Honeymooners.
Rest in peace Art Carney!

Remembering Oscar winner Art Carney
"On Nyberg: Art Carney's grandson brought in his grandfather's Oscar to reminisce his work"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg8qZqhw2Ns

Images:
1. Art Carney as Norton.
2. Art Carney was 56 when he won an Oscar for his role as a senior citizen in 1974's 'Harry and Tonto'
3. Art and Jean Carney with their children Eileen Carney, Brian Carney and Paul Carney
4. Art Carney with his wife Jean Myers Carney

Biographies
1. imdb.com/name/nm0138770/bio
2. encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/carney-arthur-william-matthew-art

1. Background from imdb.com/name/nm0138770/bio
"Art Carney
Biography Overview
Born November 4, 1918 in Mount Vernon, New York, USA
Died November 9, 2003 in Chester, Connecticut, USA
Birth Name Arthur William Matthew Carney
Nickname Mr. C
Height 5' 10" (1.78 m)

Mini Bio
Art Carney was born on November 4, 1918 in Mount Vernon, New York, USA as Arthur William Matthew Carney. He was an actor, known for Firestarter (1984), Harry and Tonto (1974) and Last Action Hero (1993). He was married to Jean Wilson Myers (remarried), Barbara Carney and Jean Wilson Myers. He died on November 9, 2003 in Chester, Connecticut, USA.

Spouse (3)
Jean Wilson Myers (remarried) (10 March 1979 - 9 November 2003) ( his death)
Barbara Carney (22 December 1966 - 1977) ( divorced)
Jean Wilson Myers (15 August 1940 - 1965) ( divorced) ( 3 children)

Trivia (33)
1. Brother of actor/director Fred Carney.
2. Father of actor Brian Carney.
3. He was the voice of "Red Lantern: The Fish Priminister" on the children's radio show "The Land of the Lost", which also starred Mae Questel and Naomi Lewis. "The Land of the Lost" was heard on the ABC Radio Network during the mid 1940s. Carney also performed on another television puppet special with "The Bil & Cora Baird Puppets" - "Art Carney Meets the Sorcerer's Apprentice" on The ABC TV Network. The show aired in the early 1960s.
4. He was a voice-over regular on the popular 1930s radio series "Gangbusters", which featured weekly episodes based on actual crime incidents. Each program ended with various descriptions of wanted criminals, many of whom were later arrested owing to avid listener participation.
5. The voice of Red Lantern on radio's "The Land of the Lost" was originally done by Junius Matthews, who did a great number of movies around that time. This show overlapped with his schedule, so it was taken over by Art Carney.
6. World War II veteran stationed in France as an infantryman. Wounded in leg by shrapnel and was hospitalized for nine months. He walked with a limp for the rest of his life.
7. Originated the role of Felix Unger (opposite Walter Matthau as Oscar Madison) in Neil Simon's "The Odd Couple" on Broadway in 1965.
8. Won a talent contest in elementary school and another at A.B. Davis High School, in Mount Vernon, from which he graduated in 1936. Had only a high school education, no formal training and never took an acting class.
9. A wound in the leg while serving as a World War II infantryman left one leg slightly shorter and gave Carney a noticeable limp for the rest of his life.
10. Won the Academy Award for playing the 72-year-old Harry Coombes in the sentimental film Harry and Tonto (1974). He was only 55 at the time but used makeup, grew a mustache, whitened his hair and stopped masking his limp.
11. Suffered a nervous breakdown over the end of his 25-year marriage to wife Jean owing to his addictions to alcohol, amphetamines and barbiturates. After recovering fully in the 1970s, he won not only an Academy Award but also his wife: They remarried.
12. He talked his way into a job with the popular Horace Heidt Orchestra and went on the road for more than three years, doing impressions, novelty songs, and some announcing for Heidt's radio show "Pot o' Gold". In 1941, when the orchestra was asked to make a movie, Carney was handed a small role. He also specialized in dialects.
13. Jackie Gleason once stated that Carney was 90% responsible for the success of The Honeymooners (1955).
14. Biography in: "Who's Who in Comedy" by Ronald L. Smith. Pg. 93-94. New York: Facts on File, 1992. ISBN [login to see]
15. He was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6627 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California, on February 8, 1960.
16. Was nominated for Broadway's 1969 Tony Award as Best Actor (Dramatic) for Brian Friel's "Lovers".
17. In a case of art (no pun intended) imitating life, the last words he ever spoke on-screen were his characters dying words: "I'm outta here..." in the action-comedy-fantasy film Last Action Hero (1993).
18. Before playing Ed Norton on The Honeymooners (1955), Carney played a policeman who gets hit by a barrel of flour in the first Honeymooners sketch on The Jackie Gleason Show (1952).
19. Beat out Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Albert Finney and Al Pacino to win his first and only Best Actor Oscar for Harry and Tonto (1974).
20. Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume 7, 2003-2005, pages 63-65. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2007.
21. In playing the 72-year-old Harry Coombes in Harry and Tonto (1974), the 55-year-old Carney convinced director Paul Mazursky by growing his own mustache, whitening his hair, wearing his own hearing aid and not trying to mask the limp he received from a World War II injury.
22. It was while appearing in "The Odd Couple" on Broadway that Carney suffered a nervous breakdown brought on by the failure of his twenty-five-year first marriage. He was forced to leave the play and enter a sanitarium for nearly six months.
23. First appeared as Ed Norton, the foil for star Jackie Gleason's character Ralph Kramden, when The Honeymooners (1955) was a regular skit between 1951 and 1952 on the DuMont Network's television program Cavalcade of Stars (1949).
24. His radio role as Philly on "The Joe and Ethel Turp Show" foreshadowed his Honeymooners characterization of Ed Norton.
25. Through his brother Jack, a musical booking agent, Carney landed his first show-business job in 1936, as a mimic and novelty singer for Horace Heidt's band. Due to this association with Heidt, he made his unbilled film debut with Pot o' Gold (1941) as a band member and radio announcer.
26. Appears as Ed Norton, with Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden, on a 44¢ USA commemorative postage stamp in the Early TV Memories issue honoring The Honeymooners (1955). The stamp was issued 11 August 2009.
27. Carney joined The Lambs, the historic theater club, in 1960. Also a member there was fellow Honeymooner Joyce Randolph, who is still a member; Joyce's husband was the Lambs' president for 11 years.
28. Prior to his death, he had been retired for more than a decade, living a quiet life at his home in Westbrook, Connecticut. [November 2003]
29. Following his death, he was interred at Riverside Cemetery at Old Saybrook, Conneticut.
30. Has three children with Jean Myers: Eileen Carney (born 1942), Brian Carney (born 1946) and Paul Carney (born 1952).
31. His maternal grandparents were Irish immigrants, and his father was also of Irish descent.
32. Was briefly linked to Bebe Kelly (an actress) in the mid 70's.
33. The Carney Awards, named after Art Carney, have been awarded annually since 2015 for "Outstanding Achievement in Character Acting". It is a lifetime achievement award, not given for specific performances.

Personal Quotes (5)
1. I love Ed Norton and what he did for my career. 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.
2. I don't tell jokes, and if I tried, I couldn't hold an audience's attention for five minutes.
3. An actor can survive a bad play, particularly if his performance is well received. But a bad movie...
4. [during an interview with columnist Earl Wilson] How would you like to go through life with your name synonymous with sewage?
5. [on his role as Ed Norton on The Honeymooners (1955)] I'm trying to change my image. You don't like going through life with your name synonymous with sewers.

Salary (2)
Cavalcade of Stars (1949) $300 /week
The Jackie Gleason Show (1966) $1,000 /week"

2. Background from encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/carney-arthur-william-matthew-art
"Carney, Arthur William Matthew (“Art”)
(b. 4 November 1918 in Mount Vernon, New York; d. 9 November 2003 in Chester, Connecticut), Oscar-winning actor and television star best known as the goofy sewer worker Ed Norton in The Honeymooners, the classic 1950s situation comedy costarring Jackie Gleason.

Carney was born in 1918 in Mount Vernon, New York, a suburban area just north of New York City in Westchester County. He was the youngest of six boys born to Edward “Ned” Carney, a public relations executive, and Helen (Farrell) Carney, a homemaker and onetime violin prodigy. Carney, a mediocre student with a flair for mimicry, attended DeWitt Clinton Grammar School and graduated from A. B. Davis High School in January 1936.

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With few other prospects for employment, Carney had help from his oldest brother, Jack, an executive with entertainment conglomerate Music Corporation of America (MCA), to get an audition with the bandleader Horace Heidt. Carney was hired as a mimic/announcer for Heidt’s band, known for their big band sound popularized by Tommy Dorsey, Glen Miller, and Fred Waring. In September 1937 Carney began touring with Heidt and also appeared on Heidt’s radio show, Pot o’ Gold, earning accolades for his impersonations of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New York politician Al Smith, among others. “My boy, you sound more like me than I do myself,” Smith told Carney after a fundraiser. In November 1938 the show business publication Variety noted that “Art Carney can still tie up the proceedings with his accuracy on the biggies.”

Carney, still touring with Heidt, appeared briefly (and unbilled) in the 1940 movie Pot ‘o Gold, based loosely on Heidt’s radio show and starring Jimmy Stewart and Paulette Goddard. On 15 August 1940 Carney married his high school sweetheart, Jean Myers. In 1941 he quit Heidt’s band and spent the next year touring as a solo comedy act in nightclubs, attracting little attention. “I couldn’t cope with the audience so close to me,” he said. In 1942 Carney’s brother, Jack, now working for the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), got him a job on the CBS radio show Report to the Nation, on which Carney impersonated politicians and celebrities including Harry S. Truman, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Wendell Wilkie. That led to jobs on other radio shows including The March of Time, The Man Behind the Gun, and Gangbusters.

Carney’s first child was born in 1942; he and Jean would eventually have two more children. In the spring of 1944 Carney was drafted into the U.S. Army. On 15 August 1944, two months after D day and on his fourth wedding anniversary, Carney was hit in the leg by a mortar shell while setting up his machine gun on the beach in Saint-Lô, France. He spent the next nine months recuperating in England and at McGuire General Hospital outside Richmond, Virginia. The injury left Carney with a pronounced limp, his right leg now shorter than his left leg.

Upon his discharge from the army, Carney resumed his radio career, signing an exclusive contract with CBS, where he playedthe“stooge” to such stars as Milton Berle, Bert Lahr, Edgar Bergen, and Ethel Merman. His radio career flourished; in 1948 he joined the comic Morey Amsterdam on The Morey Amsterdam Show, where he played dimwitted Charley the Doorman. That same year Carney joined Amsterdam when he moved his radio show to the fledgling medium of television, first to CBS and then in 1949 to the DuMont Television Network. Carney now played Newton the Waiter (a variation on Charley the Doorman), and his work on The Morey Amsterdam Show attracted national attention, including a feature story in TV Guide and an enthusiastic review from a New York Times critic who wrote that Carney “almost runs away with the show.”

In 1950 the DuMont Television Network launched a live variety show called Cavalcade of Stars, hosted by the nightclub comic Jackie Gleason. Cavalcade producers, hearing about Carney’s work on The Morey Amsterdam Show, hired him to appear in a comedy sketch with Gleason in which Gleason played a drunken playboy and Carney played the photographer sent to photograph him for a print ad. The sketch aired 15 July 1950 and demonstrated a tangible onstage chemistry between the two performers, who had never before worked together. Carney became a regular on Cavalcade of Stars, which moved to CBS in 1952 and was renamed The Jackie Gleason Show. Carney and Gleason continued to appear together in sketches, with Carney playing second banana to Gleason’s bevy of characters including Reginald Van Gleason, The Poor Soul, and Rudy the Repairman.

But it was a sketch called “The Honeymooners” that would establish Carney’s career. The sketch featured Gleason as the blustery Brooklyn bus driver Ralph Kramden and Pert Kelton (later Audrey Meadows) as Alice, his loving wife who gave as good as she got. The first “Honeymooners” sketch had aired on Cavalcade of Stars in October 1951, with only Ralph and Alice as its main characters (Carney had a bit role as a police officer). When Gleason moved his show to CBS he decided to make “The Honeymooners” a regular part of the show, and the writers created two more characters, the Kramdens’ upstairs neighbors and best friends, Ed Norton and his wife, Trixie. The dim-bulb Norton, played by Carney, worked in the sewer (he called himself a “subterranean engineer”) and, like his pal Ralph, was a lovable loser with a heart of gold. Joyce Randolph played Trixie.


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“The Honeymooners” proved extremely popular, and in 1954 Carney won the first of three consecutive Emmy Awards for his work on The Jackie Gleason Show, in particular for his role as Norton. During the 1955–1956 television season, Carney, Gleason, Meadows, and Randolph filmed thirty-nine half-hour episodes of The Honeymooners before a live audience. Those episodes, still airing around the world today, are now known as the “Classic 39” and are considered television comedy greats.

CBS cancelled The Jackie Gleason Show in 1957 and Carney, now thirty-nine years old, kept busy with regular television work (Playhouse 90, Alfred Hitchcock Presents). That same year he made his Broadway debut as a drunken philanderer opposite Joan Blondell in The Rope Dancers, winning critical acclaim. Variety noted that Carney “offers an effecting blend of charm, weakness, paternal love and blarney.” Carney continued to mix television work with stage work over the next several years, starring on Broadway in Take Her, She’s Mine (1961) and on television in The Twilight Zone and a series of National Broadcasting Company (NBC) specials including a heralded one-man performance in the drama Call Me Back.

In 1964 Carney made his first (billed) movie appearance opposite Shirley MacLaine in the comedy The Yellow Rolls-Royce, and in March 1965 he opened on Broadway opposite Walter Matthau in The Odd Couple, Neil Simon’s comedy about two mismatched roommates, slovenly sportswriter Oscar Madison (Matthau) and prissy neatnick Felix Unger (Carney). Carney left the show seven months later after suffering a nervous breakdown, the result of his ongoing battles with alcohol and depression, aggravated by the breakup of his marriage to wife Jean, who divorced him a year later. Carney spent three months recuperating in a Connecticut sanatorium and in 1966 reunited with Gleason on The Jackie Gleason Show, which had moved from New York to Miami. On 21 December 1966 Carney married Barbara Isaacs.

Gleason had revived The Honeymooners as part of his new variety show, this time as a musical version, and Carney won his fourth, fifth, and sixth Emmys (1966–1968) before leaving to star on Broadway in Lovers, for which he received a Tony Award nomination in 1968. He returned to Broadway in 1972, replacing Peter Falk in Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue. In 1973 Carney was hired by the director Paul Mazursky to star in Harry and Tonto as an elderly man who is evicted from his New York City apartment and travels cross-country with his cat, Tonto. The movie, which opened in 1974, was a hit, and Carney won an Academy Award as Best Actor, beating out Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Albert Finney, and Dustin Hoffman for the coveted trophy. Carney then starred in a series of critically acclaimed movies including The Late Show, House Calls, and Going in Style (with Lee Strasberg and George Burns).

Carney and Barbara Isaacs divorced in 1978, and the following year Carney remarried his first wife, Jean. He reteamed with Gleason for a series of Honeymooners specials on ABC (1976–1978) and spent the 1980s and early 1990s acting in movies and on television, including the television movie Terrible Joe Moran, which starred James Cagney in his last screen role and for which Carney won his seventh Emmy Award (1984). Carney made his final movie appearance in Last Action Hero (1993) before retiring. He died 9 November 2003 at age eighty-five after a long illness. He is buried in Riverside Cemetery in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Just before his death Carney was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame.

Carney was one of earliest stars of television and helped popularize the fledgling medium in the 1950s through his work on The Jackie Gleason Show, in particular by teaming with Jackie Gleason on The Honeymooners, considered by many to be one of the finest situation comedies in television history. Carney’s work over a forty-year period in television, on Broadway, and in the movies resulted in seven Emmy Awards, an Academy Award, and a Tony Award nomination—attesting both to his popularity as an entertainer and to the esteem his peers held for him.

The best source for information on Carney’s life and career is Michael Seth Starr, Art Carney: A Biography (1997). Information on Carney is also in Ronald L. Smith, entry in Who’s Who in Comedy (1992). Obituaries are in the New York Post and New York Times (both 12 Nov. 2003).
Michael Seth Starr"
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When I think of Art Carney, one movie comes to my mind. "The Night They Saved Christmas" (1984). Sure was a great actor and veteran Maj Marty Hogan