"Honeymooner" Carney Dies

And then there was one.

Oscar and Emmy winner Art Carney, who with Joyce Randolph represented the last surviving original castmembers of TV classic The Honeymooners, died Sunday in Connecticut, five days after his 85th birthday.

Carney had long been in ill health.

Last month, Carney, who created the character Ed Norton for Jackie Gleason's pioneering comedy series, was tapped for induction into the Television Academy's Hall of Fame. Ceremonies are to be held some time in February.

In a show-biz career that dated back to the 1930s and spanned Broadway, radio, prime time and the movies, it is The Honeymooners and Norton, the affable sewer worker to Gleason's short-fuse bus driver Ralph Kramden, that defined Carney in the public eye.

Gleason once said of his punchline partner: "He was funny as hell."

Carney won seven Emmys, five of them for playing Norton in various Gleason TV shows, per the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. (IMDb.com has Carney taking six of the seven for Gleason, and presumably Norton, performances.)

He claimed the Best Actor Oscar for 1974's Harry and Tonto. Although then only 56, Carney played an aged widower, Harry, who hits the road with his cat, Tonto. In winning, he upset the younger, showier likes of Jack Nicholson (Chinatown), Al Pacino (The Godfather, Part II) and Dustin Hoffman (Lenny).

Prestigious or no, the Academy Award didn't do much to de-Norton Carney, much as originating the role of Felix Unger in the 1965 Broadway production of The Odd Couple hadn't altered his career trajectory. Carney was a character actor. It just so happened his most memorable character was Ed Norton.

Born Nov. 4, 1918, in New York, Carney was a show-biz lifer. His first gigs, as an impressionist (he did a killer FDR), came on the radio and onstage. During World War II, he took on the role of Army soldier and participated in the D-Day Normandy invasion.

In 1951, then-minor performer Jackie Gleason introduced a sketch called "The Honeymooners" on the variety show, Calvalcade of Stars, for the then-fledging medium of television on the soon-to-be defunct DuMont network.

From the inglorious beginning, the bit, helping put the situation in "situation comedy," revolved around the work-a-day antics of Ralph (Gleason), wife Alice (originally Pert Kelton) and their neighbors, the Nortons, Ed (Carney) and Trixie (Randolph). Until the arrival of All in the Family in the 1970s and Roseanne in the 1980s, the Kamdens and Nortons arguably represented TV's most heartfelt portrayals of the blue-collar American household.

When Gleason got his own CBS show in 1952, "The Honeymooners" came with him. Later that year, Audrey Meadows replaced Kelton as Alice Kramden. The Honeymooners quartet that future cable viewers would come to know best was complete.

In 1955, "The Honeymooners," the sketch, became The Honeymooners, the series. Thirty-nine episodes were produced and replayed and replayed and replayed. (Cable's TV Land will air all 39 shows, starting at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Friday, in tribute to Carney.)

In 1966, about the same time The Flintstones was ending its cartoon riff on Kramden, et al, Gleason reformed the gang, if not all the original actors, for another eponymous CBS variety series. In the sketches, Gleason and Carney played off their new TV spouses, Sheila MacRae and Jane Kean. Carney again donned the Norton vest and hat for the 1976 special The Honeymooners: The Second Honeymoon. In that instance, all the Honeymooners were present and accounted for, except Randolph, now 78, who rarely surfaced after the sitcom ended in 1956.

Carney reportedly battled alcoholism in the 1960s, his demons cutting short his Broadway run in The Odd Couple. In 1969, he rebounded to earn a Tony nomination for the play Lovers.

In the 1970s, the Academy Award was good for business, helping him book bits in everything from the 1979 comedy Going in Style to, most inexplicably, The Star Wars Holiday Special, the almost-lost, but not-forgotten misfit of the George Lucas empire. (The 1978 TV special, broadcast just once and never released on home video, features Chewbacca's Wookiee family--speaking in Wookiee-ese for two hours.)

Carney reteamed with Gleason for the 1985 TV movie Izzy and Moe, in which they played a down-and-out vaudevillians.

Gleason died in 1987; Pert Kelton, in 1968; Audrey Meadows, 1996.

Carney's final Emmy came for the 1984 TV movie Terrible Joe Moran, about a former boxing champ. For a change, Carney was honored for playing someone other than Ed Norton.

Survivors include Carney's third wife, the former Jean Myers, who also was his first wife. The couple, high school sweethearts, remarried in 1980.