Red Buttons, the impish former burlesque comic who became an early TV sensation and an Academy Award-winning character actor during a career that spanned more than seven decades, died Thursday. He was 87.
He died at his Century City home after a long battle with vascular disease, said publicist Warren Cowan.
A product of New York’s Lower East Side, Mr. Buttons already had performed in Minsky’s Burlesque and in Broadway plays and musicals by the time he became an overnight hit on television in 1952 with the launch of “The Red Buttons Show” on CBS.
A comedy-variety show, it featured the comic’s monologues, dance numbers and sketches with regulars and guests.
Mr. Buttons inspired children around the country to mimic him singing his signature “Ho Ho Song,” in which he hopped around singing, “Ho Ho! Hee Hee! Ha Ha! Strange things are happening.” The Academy of Radio and Television Arts and Sciences named him Comedian of the Year in 1954.
But Mr. Buttons’ time at the top on TV was short-lived. The show, which moved to NBC when CBS canceled it after its second season, became a sitcom and was off the air a year later.
But in late 1957 he was unexpectedly back on top with his dramatic supporting role in the screen adaptation of James Michener’s novel “Sayonara,” starring Marlon Brando as an Army major who falls in love with a Japanese woman after he is assigned to an air base in Japan during the Korean War.
Mr. Buttons’ role as the tragic Joe Kelly, an enlisted man in Brando’s company who marries his Japanese sweetheart despite a military policy forbidding interracial marriage, earned him an Oscar and a Golden Globe for best supporting actor.
“I’m a little guy,” Mr. Buttons–5 foot 6 and 140 pounds–said at the time, “and that’s what I play all the time, a little guy and his troubles.”
He appeared in more than 30 films, including “Hatari!” “The Longest Day,” “Harlow,” “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” and “The Poseidon Adventure.”
He was born Aaron Chwatt in New York in 1919. Mr. Buttons said his father, a Polish immigrant, sparked his desire to get into show business.
“He was a clown who liked to sing and dance,” Mr. Buttons told Newsday in 1995. “I noticed he made people happy.”
