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Herbert John (Jackie) Gleason (February 26, 1916
– June 24, 1987), nicknamed "The Great One",
was a rotund, Brooklyn-born comedian famous for
brash humor and fast ad-libs who immortalized his
Chauncey Street neighborhood in The Honeymooners,
playing bus driver Ralph Kramden alongside his pal
and upstairs neighbor, sewer worker Art Carney|Ed
Norton, and their wives Audrey Meadows|Alice
Kramden and Joyce Randolph|Trixie Norton.  The
foursome were later transplanted into the Stone
Age on The Flintstones, the entire show being a
transparent tribute to The Honeymooners.

==Biography==
Gleason first gained recognition in the Broadway
play Follow the Girls. He simultaneously appeared
in small parts in such films as Springtime in the
Rockies and Navy Blues, but did not make a mark in
Hollywood in his early years.

In 1949, he played the role of Chester A. Riley on
the short-lived TV comedy The Life of Riley. 
William Bendix had originated the role on radio,
and Gleason's series was unsuccessful.   At the
same time, his nightclub act was drawing attention
from New York City's inner circle.

Gleason was hired as the host of Cavalcade of
Stars, where he originated many of his famous
characters and skits, from 1950 to 1952 on the
small DuMont Television Network.  The debut of The
Honeymooners came on October 5, 1951, with
character actor Pert Kelton in the role of Alice,
and Art Carney - not as the now-familiar Norton,
but playing a neighborhood cop in a brief sketch. 
Within a few years, Gleason moved to CBS,
retitling his program The Jackie Gleason Show,
which quickly became the number two television
show in the nation behind I Love Lucy.  In 1955,
Gleason abandoned his live variety hour for a
filmed run of The Honeymooners, which lasted one
season.  These episodes have been re-run in
syndication for years, and are often referred to
as the Classic 39.  Ironically, these programs
were filmed for CBS by DuMont, Gleason's old
network, using a new process called Electronicam.

Gleason returned to his variety show the following
year, but by 1959, Art Carney had left the show
and it had run out of steam.  An abortive attempt
at a game show, You're in the Picture, was a
notorious flop - cancelled after the first
episode, with Gleason spending the following
week's half-hour delivering a rather funny apology
for the earlier show.  Finally, in 1962, Gleason
returned to weekly television with a splashy
variety hour entitled Jackie Gleason and His
American Scene Magazine, which lasted four
seasons.  The show moved to Miami Beach starting
in 1964 (reportedly so that Gleason could indulge
in one of his favorite pastimes, golf, year-round)
and was again called The Jackie Gleason Show for
the last four years of its run, which were in
color.  Many of these latter shows were
full-length hour-long musical versions of The
Honeymooners (some with plots recycled from the
earlier series) and the revamped program, plus the
added lure of color television, pushed Gleason's
ratings back into the Top 5.  

One of his trademark phrases was "How sweet it
is!", uttered during the applause at the opening
of his show.  Gleason first said these words
during his starring role in the movie Papa's
Delicate Condition, and brought them to television
with the debut of his 1962 American Scene TV
series.  Another famous Gleason catch-phrase was
"And awa-a-ay we go!", usually said as he ended
his monologue and exited, stage left.  In his
later years, Gleason would often close the show by
saying, "The Miami Beach audience is the greatest
audience in the world!"

Gleason, employing the same talent and pathos as
he did portraying Ralph Kramden, proved to be an
excellent dramatic actor, and was acclaimed for
his live television performances in The Laugh
Maker on CBS' Studio One(where he played a
semi-autobiographical role as fictional TV
comedian Jerry Giles), and in William Saroyan's
The Time of Your Life, also for CBS as an episode
of the famed anthology series Playhouse 90.  He
later earned praise for his portrayal of Minnesota
Fats in the 1961 Paul Newman movie The Hustler, in
which he made his own pool shots.  The role earned
Gleason an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting
Actor.  In the 1970s, Gleason gained further fame
for his portrayal of foul-mouthed Sheriff Buford
T. Justice in the Smokey and the Bandit series of
films.  Reportedly, Gleason was also considered
for the role of Archie Bunker in Norman Lear's
groundbreaking comedy All in the Family, which
occupied the Saturday-night time slot that
Gleason's variety show once held.  

Gleason's show was eventually cancelled due to
declining ratings, an aging audience, and the
ever-increasing costs of producing a weekly
variety show live-on-tape.  In the last original
Honeymooners episode aired on CBS, "Operation
Protest," Ralph Kramden encounters the
youth-protest movement of the late 1960s and early
1970s.  It was a sign of the changing times.

After leaving CBS in 1970, Gleason and his cohort
Carney appeared in several Honeymooners specials
on ABC during the 1970s, and a made-for-television
movie, Izzy and Moe.  In 1985, three decades after
the debut of the filmed Honeymooners, Gleason
revealed that he had carefully preserved
kinescopes of his live 1950s programs in a vault
for future use.  The "Lost Episodes," as they came
to be called, first aired on the Showtime cable
network and later were syndicated to local TV
stations. 

Throughout the 1950s and early '60s, Gleason
enjoyed a secondary career in recorded music,
lending his name to a series of best-selling "mood
music" albums for the Capitol Records label. 
Although Gleason could not read or write music in
a conventional sense, he was able to compose
melodies "in his head" and transpose them with the
help of an able staff.  There has been some minor
controversy over the years as to how much credit
Gleason should have received for the finished
product.

Gleason had an interest in the paranormal, and
evidently believed in Unidentified flying
object|UFOs, claiming to have seen them himself.
There was even a report that Richard Nixon took
Gleason to view the remains of aliens killed in
the crash of a flying saucer, but as this
particular report first appeared in the pages of
the National Enquirer, it is dubious at best.

Jackie Gleason's final role came in the 1986 film
Nothing in Common, playing an Archie Bunker-esque
character opposite a young Tom Hanks.  It was not
widely known at the time that he was fighting
against a terminal illness.  Diagnosed with cancer
of the liver and colon, Gleason checked himself
out of the hospital and died quietly at his
Florida home on June 24, 1987.

On June 30, 1988 the Sunset Park Bus Depot in
Brooklyn was renamed in honor of the native
Brooklynite, becoming the Jackie Gleason Bus
Depot. (Gleason's Ralph Kramden worked for the
fictional Gotham Bus Company.)  A statue of
Gleason as Ralph Kramden in his bus driver's
uniform was dedicated in August, 2000 in New York
City by the cable TV channel TV Land. The statue
is located at 40th Street and 8th Avenue at the
entrance of the Port Authority of New York and New
Jersey bus terminal.  Another such statue stands
at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
Hall of Fame in North Hollywood, California,
showing Gleason in his famous "And awa-a-ay we
go!" pose.

In 2003, after an absence of more than thirty
years, color episodes of The Honeymooners, gleaned
from the 1966-70 Miami Beach shows, returned to
American television on the Good Life TV Network. 
In 2005, a movie version of The Honeymooners
appeared in theatres, with a twist - a primarily
African-American cast, headed by Cedric the
Entertainer.  This version, however, bore only a
passing resemblance to Gleason's original series
and was widely panned by critics, including
WNBC-TV's Jeffrey Lyons.

A television movie, called Gleason, took a deeper
look into the life of Gleason.  It featured his
private life at home (which few people ever got to
see), as well as scenes from backstage of his
well-known shows.  Brad Garrett, from Everybody
Loves Raymond, portrayed Gleason.

==TV Work==
*The Life of Riley (1949-1950)
*Cavalcade of Stars (host from 1950-1952)
*The Jackie Gleason Show (1952-1959)
*The Honeymooners (1955-1956)
*The Secret World of Eddie Hodges (1960)
(narrator)
*You're in the Picture (1961)
*The Million Dollar Incident (1961)
*Jackie Gleason and His American Scene Magazine
(1962-1966)
*The Jackie Gleason Show (1966-1970)
*Julie and Jackie: How Sweet Is Is (1974)
*The Lucille Ball/Jackie Gleason Special (1975)
*The Honeymooners Second Honeymoon (1976) (also
director)
*The Honeymooners Christmas Special (1977) (also
director)
*The Honeymooners Valentine Special (1978)
*Mr. Halpern and Mr. Johnson (1983)
*Izzy and Moe (1985)

==Filmography==
*Navy Blues (1941)
*Steel Against the Sky (1941)
*All Through the Night (1942)
*Lady Gangster (1942)
*Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1942)
*Larceny, Inc. (1942)
*Escape from Crime (1942)
*Orchestra Wives (1942)
*Springtime in the Rockies (1942)
*The Desert Hawk (1950)
*The Hustler (1961)
*Gigot (1962) (also writer)
*Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962)
*Papa's Delicate Condition (1963)
*Soldier in the Rain (1963)
*Skidoo (1968)
*How to Commit Marriage (1969)
*Don't Drink the Water (1969)
*How Do I Love Thee? (1970)
*Mr. Billion (1977)
*Smokey and the Bandit (1977)
*Smokey and the Bandit II (1980)
*The Toy (1982)
*The Sting II (1983)
*Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 (1983)
*Nothing in Common (1986)

==Stage Appearances==
*Keep Off the Grass (1940)
*Artists and Models (1943)
*Follow the Girls (1944)
*Along Fifth Avenue (1949)
*Take Me Along (1959)

==Record Albums==
*Music for Lovers Only (1953)
*Music, Martinis and Memories (1954)
*Lover's Rhapsody (1955)
*Music to Make You Misty (1955)
*Tawny (1955)
*And Awaaay We Go! (1955)
*Romantic Jazz (1955)
*Music to Remember Her (1955)
*Lonesome Echo (1955)
*Music to Change Her Mind (1956)
*Night Winds (1956)
*Merry Christmas (1956)
*Music for the Love Hours (1957)
*Velvet Brass (1957)

	Web Quotableonline.com Frasescelebres.org Greatbookscollection.org

Herbert John "Jackie" Gleason (February 26, 1916 -
June 24, 1987), nicknamed "The Great One", was a
rotund, Brooklyn-born comedian famous for brash
humor and fast ad-libs who immortalized his
Chauncey Street neighborhood in The Honeymooners,
playing bus driver Ralph Kramden alongside his pal
and upstairs neighbor, sewer worker Art Carney|Ed
Norton, and their wives Audrey Meadows|Alice
Kramden and Joyce Randolph|Trixie Norton.  The
foursome were later transplanted into the Stone
Age on The Flintstones, the entire show being a
transparent tribute to The Honeymooners.

==Biography==
Born in Bushwick, New York, Gleason grew up an
only child, abandoned by his father (probably the
reason he never mentions Ralph Kramden having a
father on The Honeymooners) and raised by his
loving, but work-worn and troubled mother, who
died when he was around 16. Jackie Gleason first
gained recognition in the Broadway play Follow the
Girls. He simultaneously appeared in small parts
in such films as Springtime in the Rockies and
Navy Blues, but did not make a mark in Hollywood
in his early years.

In 1949, he played the role of Chester A. Riley on
the short-lived TV comedy The Life of Riley.
William Bendix had originated the role on radio,
and Gleason's series was unsuccessful. At the same
time, his nightclub act was drawing attention from
New York City's inner circle.

Gleason was hired as the host of Cavalcade of
Stars, where he originated many of his famous
characters and skits, from 1950 to 1952 on the
small DuMont Television Network.  The debut of The
Honeymooners came on October 5, 1951, with
character actor Pert Kelton in the role of 'Alice
Kramden' (which she would lose later due to the
Blacklist), and Art Carney - not as the
now-familiar Norton, but playing a neighborhood
cop in a brief sketch.  Within a few years,
Gleason moved to CBS, retitling his program The
Jackie Gleason Show, which quickly became the
number two television show in the nation behind I
Love Lucy.  In 1955, Gleason abandoned his live
variety hour for a filmed run of The Honeymooners,
which lasted one season.  These episodes have been
re-run in syndication for years, and are often
referred to as the Classic 39.  Ironically, these
programs were filmed for CBS by DuMont, Gleason's
old network, using a new process called
Electronicam.

Gleason returned to his variety show the following
year, but by 1959, Art Carney had left the show
and it had run out of steam.  An abortive attempt
at a game show, You're in the Picture, was a
notorious flop - cancelled after the first
episode, with Gleason spending the following
week's half-hour delivering a rather funny apology
for the earlier show.  Finally, in 1962, Gleason
returned to weekly television with a splashy
variety hour entitled Jackie Gleason and His
American Scene Magazine, which lasted four
seasons.  The show moved to Miami Beach starting
in 1964 (reportedly so that Gleason could indulge
in one of his favorite pastimes, golf, year-round)
and was again called The Jackie Gleason Show for
the last four years of its run, which were in
color.  Many of these latter shows were
full-length hour-long musical versions of The
Honeymooners (some with plots recycled from the
earlier series) and the revamped program, plus the
added lure of color television, pushed Gleason's
ratings back into the Top 5.  

One of his trademark phrases was "How sweet it
is!", uttered during the applause at the opening
of his show.  Gleason first said these words
during his starring role in the movie Papa's
Delicate Condition, and brought them to television
with the debut of his 1962 American Scene TV
series.  Another famous Gleason catch-phrase was
"And awa-a-ay we go!", usually said as he ended
his monologue and exited, stage left.  In his
later years, Gleason would often close the show by
saying, "The Miami Beach audience is the greatest
audience in the world!"

Gleason, employing the same talent and pathos as
he did portraying Ralph Kramden, proved to be an
excellent dramatic actor, and was acclaimed for
his live television performances in The Laugh
Maker on CBS' Studio One(where he played a
semi-autobiographical role as fictional TV
comedian Jerry Giles), and in William Saroyan's
The Time of Your Life, also for CBS as an episode
of the famed anthology series Playhouse 90.  He
later earned praise for his portrayal of Minnesota
Fats in the 1961 Paul Newman movie The Hustler, in
which he made his own pool shots.  The role earned
Gleason an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting
Actor.  In the 1970s, Gleason gained further fame
for his portrayal of foul-mouthed Sheriff Buford
T. Justice in the Smokey and the Bandit series of
films.  Reportedly, Gleason was also considered
for the role of Archie Bunker in Norman Lear's
groundbreaking comedy All in the Family, which
occupied the Saturday-night time slot that
Gleason's variety show once held.  

Gleason's show was eventually cancelled due to
declining ratings, an aging audience, and the
ever-increasing costs of producing a weekly
variety show live-on-tape.  In the last original
Honeymooners episode aired on CBS, "Operation
Protest," Ralph Kramden encounters the
youth-protest movement of the late 1960s and early
1970s.  It was a sign of the changing times.

After leaving CBS in 1970, Gleason and his cohort
Carney appeared in several Honeymooners specials
on American Broadcasting Company|ABC during the
1970s, and a made-for-television movie, Izzy and
Moe.  In 1985, three decades after the debut of
the filmed Honeymooners, Gleason revealed that he
had carefully preserved kinescopes of his live
1950s programs in a vault for future use.  The
"Lost Episodes," as they came to be called, first
aired on the Showtime cable network and later were
syndicated to local TV stations. 

Throughout the 1950s and early '60s, Gleason
enjoyed a secondary career in recorded music,
lending his name to a series of best-selling "mood
music" albums for the Capitol Records label. 
Although Gleason could not read or write music in
a conventional sense, he was able to compose
melodies "in his head" and transpose them with the
help of an able staff.  There has been some minor
controversy over the years as to how much credit
Gleason should have received for the finished
product.

Gleason had an interest in the paranormal, and
evidently believed in Unidentified flying
object|UFOs, claiming to have seen them himself.
There was even a report that Richard Nixon took
Gleason to view the remains of aliens killed in
the crash of a flying saucer, but as this
particular report first appeared in the pages of
the National Enquirer, it is dubious at best.

Jackie Gleason's final role came in the 1986 film
Nothing in Common, playing an Archie Bunker-esque
character opposite a young Tom Hanks.  It was not
widely known at the time that he was fighting
against a terminal illness. Diagnosed with cancer
of the liver and colon, Gleason checked himself
out of the hospital and died quietly at his
Florida home on June 24, 1987 at the age of 71.

On June 30, 1988 the Sunset Park Bus Depot in
Brooklyn was renamed in honor of the native
Brooklynite, becoming the Jackie Gleason Bus
Depot. (Gleason's Ralph Kramden worked for the
fictional Gotham Bus Company.) A statue of Gleason
as Ralph Kramden in his bus driver's uniform was
dedicated in August, 2000 in New York City by the
cable TV channel TV Land. The statue is located at
40th Street and 8th Avenue at the entrance of the
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey bus
terminal.  Another such statue stands at the
Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of
Fame in North Hollywood, California, showing
Gleason in his famous "And awa-a-ay we go!" pose.

In 2003, after an absence of more than thirty
years, color episodes of The Honeymooners, gleaned
from the 1966-70 Miami Beach shows, returned to
American television on the Good Life TV Network. 
In 2005, a movie version of The Honeymooners
appeared in theatres, with a twist - a primarily
African-American cast, headed by Cedric the
Entertainer.  This version, however, bore only a
passing resemblance to Gleason's original series
and was widely panned by critics, including
WNBC-TV's Jeffrey Lyons.

A television movie, called Gleason, took a deeper
look into the life of Gleason.  It featured his
private life at home (which few people ever got to
see), as well as scenes from backstage of his
well-known shows. Brad Garrett, from Everybody
Loves Raymond, portrayed Gleason, despite
Garrett's height (6'9"), which created some
logistical problems on the sets, which had to be
specially made so that Garrett did not tower over
everyone else.

==TV Work==
*The Life of Riley (1949-1950)
*Cavalcade of Stars (host from 1950-1952)
*The Jackie Gleason Show (1952-1959)
*The Honeymooners (1955-1956)
*The Secret World of Eddie Hodges (1960)
(narrator)
*You're in the Picture (1961)
*The Million Dollar Incident (1961)
*Jackie Gleason and His American Scene Magazine
(1962-1966)
*The Jackie Gleason Show (1966-1970)
*Julie and Jackie: How Sweet Is Is (1974)
*The Lucille Ball/Jackie Gleason Special (1975)
*The Honeymooners Second Honeymoon (1976) (also
director)
*The Honeymooners Christmas Special (1977) (also
director)
*The Honeymooners Valentine Special (1978)
*Mr. Halpern and Mr. Johnson (1983)
*Izzy and Moe (1985)

==Filmography==
*Navy Blues (1941)
*Steel Against the Sky (1941)
*All Through the Night (1942)
*Lady Gangster (1942)
*Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1942)
*Larceny, Inc. (1942)
*Escape from Crime (1942)
*Orchestra Wives (1942)
*Springtime in the Rockies (1942)
*The Desert Hawk (1950)
*The Hustler (1961)
*Gigot (1962) (also writer)
*Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962)
*Papa's Delicate Condition (1963)
*Soldier in the Rain (1963)
*Skidoo (1968)
*How to Commit Marriage (1969)
*Don't Drink the Water (1969)
*How Do I Love Thee? (1970)
*Mr. Billion (1977)
*Smokey and the Bandit (1977)
*Smokey and the Bandit II (1980)
*The Toy (1982)
*The Sting II (1983)
*Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 (1983)
*Nothing in Common (1986)

==Stage Appearances==
*Keep Off the Grass (1940)
*Artists and Models (1943)
*Follow the Girls (1944)
*Along Fifth Avenue (1949)
*Take Me Along (1959)

==Record Albums==
*Music for Lovers Only (1953)
*Music, Martinis and Memories (1954)
*Lover's Rhapsody (1955)
*Music to Make You Misty (1955)
*Tawny (1955)
*And Awaaay We Go! (1955)
*Romantic Jazz (1955)
*Music to Remember Her (1955)
*Lonesome Echo (1955)
*Music to Change Her Mind (1956)
*Night Winds (1956)
*Merry Christmas (1956)
*Music for the Love Hours (1957)
*Velvet Brass (1957)

== External links ==
*imdb name|id=0001276|name=Jackie Gleason
*http://obits.com/gleasonjackie.html Internet
Obituary for Jackie Gleason