Tim Conway has died at the age of 85.
He passed away at 8:45 a.m. in the Los Angeles area on Tuesday, his rep Howard Bragman confirms to PEOPLE.
Prior to his death, he suffered complications from Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH) and had no signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s.
At a 2013 event promoting his memoir,What’s So Funny? My Hilarious Life, Burnett, now 86, painted her collaborator as an on-set prankster.
“Tim’s goal in life was to destroy [costar] Harvey Korman,” she told the crowd, according toThe Hollywood Reporter.
“Harvey wet his pants,” Conway bragged.
It’s an anecdote he also recalled in a 2013 interview with theLos Angeles Times.
“Harvey never saw what I was going to do until he was actually doing the sketch,” he said. “As a matter of fact in the dentist sketch you can actually see Harvey wet his pants from laughing.”
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“I looked in the garbage and there was this long neon tube,” he remembered. “So I took that. As the lieutenant came around the corner. I said, ‘Halt.’ I am pointing this bulb at him and he said ‘What is that?’ I said, ‘It’s a light bulb and if you come any closer, I’ll turn it on.’ He had very little sense of humor. I spent an extra two weeks [in the service] painting rocks in Seattle.”
After his military service, he worked at a local station in Cleveland.
“I had no professional training. I had a sense of humor and had been in front of a microphone,” Conway said of his show business beginnings on an episode ofThe Interviews: An Oral History of Televisionin 2004.
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He appeared as a guest star onThe Carol Burnett Showfor eight seasons before becoming a regular in 1975.
“They used to do 33 shows a year onBurnett,” he told theL.A. Times.“She said why don’t you just be a regular on the show? I said I will tell you what. I will do 32 shows and leave one week open at the end, so I can guest on somebody’s show. I always guested on her show, but I did have the right to go somewhere else. My job on every show was to break everybody up.”
His own sitcom,The Tim Conway Show, had lasted one season in 1970. His variety show of the same name aired from 1980-81.
Conway also starred onMcHale’s Navy, voiced Barnacle Boy onSpongebobSquarepants and even made aspecial appearanceon the second season of30 Rock, for which hereceived an Emmy.
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Conway’s death comes after his daughter Kelly and wife Charlene had been fighting over his care.
Kelly filed court documentsasking to be appointed conservatorof her father in order to be in charge of his medical treatments in in August 2018. She alleged that Charlene was “planning to move him out of the excellent skilled nursing facility he is currently at” and place him into a lesser quality home. She claimed her father could not “properly provide for his personal needs for physical health, food, and clothing” and is “almost entirely unresponsive.”
Days later, Kellysought a temporary restraining orderto stop the move. But in March, Charlene wasappointed conservatorof her husband.
Before his wedding to Charlene in 1984, Conway was married to Mary Anne Dalton from 1961-78. Together they shareseven children: sons Jaime, Tim Jr., Pat, Corey and Shawn and daughter Jackie and Kelly.
source: people.com
