February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The Westchester-born actor will undoubtedly be best remembered for his performance as sewer worker Ed Norton, partnering Jackie Gleason’s bus driver, Ralph Kramden, in the TV series “The Honeymooners.”
The show debuted in 1950 and is still almost unavoidably present on re-runs. Carney’s participation in “The Honeymooners” made him rich and brought him five of his six Emmy Awards. But it obscured the genuine breadth and depth of the actor’s talents. In 1968, Carney won a Tony Award for his performance in Brian Friel’s play “Lovers,” first at Lincoln Center and then in the show’s transfer to Broadway.
Although Carney made relatively few films, he won the 1974 Academy Award for best actor for “Harry and Toronto.” The actor played a 72-year-old man who, having lost his job, set out on a cross-country trip accompanied only by his marmalade cat. Carney, who was 55 at the time, initially didn’t want to do the movie because he didn’t feel he was ready to portray an elderly character, but yielded when the director, Paul Mazursky, told him that Harry was unusually young at heart.
In 1965, he starred on Broadway in Neil Simon’s comedy “The Odd Couple,” playing the compulsively tidy Felix Unger opposite Walter Matthau’s disheveled Oscar Madison. It was during the long run of “The Odd Couple” that some of Carney’s problems came to the surface. He had, at times, struggled with alcoholism, but at this point his 25-year marriage to his high-school sweetheart, Jean Myers, came to an end and the actor suffered a nervous breakdown, symptoms of which plagued him for much of the rest of his life.
The illness forced the actor to withdraw from the Simon smash, and, after publicly admitting his dependence on alcohol, amphetamines and barbiturates, he spent nearly six months in a sanitarium.
Friends and associates maintained that they could tell when Carney’s stress levels were building to the danger point when he began to exhibit behavior that seemed more like Felix, the terminally repressed character he’d created in the Simon play.
For example, people close to Carney worried when he began stacking his pocket change on his dressing table, face up, with the largest coins on the bottom and the smallest on top.
When “The Odd Couple” was made into a film, Matthau recreated his stage role, but Carney lost out to Jack Lemmon.
Arthur William Matthew Carney was born on Nov. 4, 1918, in Mount Vernon, N.Y., the youngest of six sons of Edward Michael Carney and Helen Farrell Carney.
He was the class clown in elementary school and began winning talent contests in primary school and in high school, perhaps an odd aspect in the life of a boy who became a rather shy and withdrawn adult when he wasn’t actually performing.
Carney whose formal education ended at A.B. Davis High School in Mount Vernon, never took an acting class of any sort. Instead, he joined the Horace Heidt Orchestra and spent three years on the road, doing impersonations of famous public figures and singing novelty tunes.
After leaving Heidt, Carney tried his hand at vaudeville and even nightclubs, but mainly met with failure, except for his skill as doing impressions, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which won him a job at CBS.
Then the war came along and the actor was drafted, ending up in France as an infantryman, until he suffered a shrapnel wound at St. Lo, a month after the Normandy invasion. The injury caused him to be hospitalized for several months and left him with a lifelong limp.
In 1950, Carney and Gleason teamed for a single sketch on “Cavalcade of Stars,” a weekly show on the old DuMont Network, on which the rotund comic served as host.
The one Emmy Award Carney won, apart from those his long and fruitful partnership with Gleason brought him, came as the result of his collaboration with another celebrated Irish-American performer, James Cagney.
The year was 1984, and Carney played the confidant of an aged boxer portrayed by Cagney. The show, “Terrible Joe Moran,” was James Cagney’s final film for television.
In 1957, Art Carney briefly co-starred on Broadway with the great Irish actress Siobhan McKenna, in the short-lived drama, “The Rope Dancers.” The same year saw the actor portraying Robert Briscoe, a Jew who had been elected lord mayor of Dublin, in a TV play entitled “The Fabulous Irishman.”
Carney and Jean Myers, who married in 1940, had three children, Eileen, Brian and Paul. After the couple divorced, in 1965, the actor married Barbara Isaac, eventually divorcing. After his second divorce, Carney remarried his first wife, who, along with their sons and daughter, survive him.