I am saddened by the death of the most excellent Art Carney at 85:

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.

....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.

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