Tim Conway, the agile comedian who was a core member of the “The Carol BurnettShow” troupe and starred in string of Disney film comedies in the 1970s, died Tuesday morning in Los Angeles. He was 85.
A rep for Conway tells Variety he died from water on the brain.
In later years, Conway had success with his “Dorf” series of comic how-to videos in which he played a bumbling, diminutive Scandinavian character by standing on his knees. He also lent his versatile voice to a slew of animated productions ranging from “SpongeBob SquarePants” to “Scooby Doo” to the Christian video series “Hermie and Friends.”
Over his long career, Conway was nominated for 13 Emmys and won six. For “The Carol Burnett Show,” he was nominated six times as a supporting performer in a variety or comedy series, winning in 1973, 1977 and 1978. He was also nominated as part of the writing staff for the show, drawing three nominations and winning in 1978. In addition to those four Emmy wins, he won in 1996 for outstanding guest actor in a comedy, “Coach,” and in 2008 for guest actor in a comedy for “30 Rock.”
On “The Carol Burnett Show,” Conway was so side-splittingly hilarious that he often caused co-star Harvey Korman to begin laughing in the middle of a skit. He was known for ad-libbing bits that would challenge Korman and other co-stars including Vicki Lawrence and Lyle Waggoner.
Conway appeared as many characters on the show, but the two most famous were the Old Man and Mr. Tudball. The Old Man shuffled along at an agonizingly slow pace vastly insufficient to the occupations in which the show’s writers would place him. His inability to get things done usually resulted in slapstick, and Conway would ad lib a good deal.
Mr. Tudball was a businessman who aimed to run a “ship-shape” office, but such intentions would always go unfulfilled because of the bored indifference of his secretary, Mrs. Wiggins (Burnett). The character was widely thought to be Swedish, but Conway actually imitated the accent of his Romanian mother.
“Carol Burnett” ran for 11 seasons on CBS from 1967-78. Conway appeared on a single episode in 1967 and then became a regular member of the comedienne’s troupe from 1975 until the show’s end.
In 2012 Burnett, Conway and Lawrence asked in an interview for Sirius XM Satellite Radio if there were occasions where they worried about having enough material for the show, Burnett replied: “No, because we could always count on Tim to go over. So there was always enough show. In fact, sometimes, because he would get on a roll and do stuff we had never seen before, so maybe a four-minute sketch would turn into a 10-minute sketch — thanks to Conway — and we could then bank another sketch that we were going to do that week for another week.”
Conway’s career had first been jump-started by the World War II-set sitcom “McHale’s Navy,” starring Ernest Borgnine. He played the bumbling, naive Ensign Charles Parker, executive officer of the PT-73, on 138 episodes of the show (1962-66), as well as the two feature films based on it, receiving his first Emmy nomination for his performance, in 1963.
(Excerpt) Read more in: Variety
