Art Carney: A Biography Hardcover - 1997

From the publisher

Art Carney is one of the first legendary superstars spawned by the age of television. His meteoric rise to fame began in the Fifties as Jackie Gleason's sidekick, sewer worker Ed Norton in The Honeymooners - one of TV's all-time favorites, a perennial fixture on the small screen. Carney's irrepressible comic genius earned him his first breaks, in clubs and on radio, and with bit parts on the new medium of television. When he landed the supporting role opposite Jackie Gleason - a B-movie Hollywood actor and mediocre nightclub comic then producing some of the most brilliant sketch comedy on the small screen - television history was about to be made. The screwball antics of Gleason and Carney became an instant classic. But Carney had to spend years trying to shake the image of Norton, lamenting time and again how he was always identified as Gleason's goofy pal. But shake it he did, on Broadway and in Hollywood, revealing himself as a brilliant actor who garnered some of the most prized awards of stage and screen, including six Emmys. In this first biography of Art Carney, Michael Seth Starr tells the story of an extremely private, nearly unapproachable figure, a show business recluse whose sweetness and introverted nature mask the ferocity of rare acting talent, a man who struggled with clinical depression and alcohol to become one of America's most beloved comic actors.