Herbert John Gleason (born Herbert Walton Gleason Jr.; February 26, 1916 – June 24, 1987), known as Jackie Gleason, was an American comedian, actor, writer, and composer also known as "The Great One".
He developed a style and characters from growing up in Brooklyn, New York, and was known for his brash visual and verbal comedy, exemplified by his city bus driver character Ralph Kramden in the television series The Honeymooners. He also developed The Jackie Gleason Show, which maintained high ratings from the mid-1950s through 1970. The series originated in New York City, but filming moved to Miami Beach, Florida, in 1964 after Gleason took up permanent residence there.
Among his notable film roles were Minnesota Fats in 1961's The Hustler (co-starring with Paul Newman) and Buford T. Justice in the Smokey and the Bandit trilogy from 1977 to 1983 (co-starring Burt Reynolds).
Gleason enjoyed a prominent secondary music career during the 1950s and 1960s, producing a series of bestselling "mood music" albums. His first album Music for Lovers Only still holds the record for the longest stay on the Billboard Top Ten Charts (153 weeks), and his first ten albums sold over a million copies each. His output includes more than 20 singles, nearly 60 long-playing record albums, and more than 40 CDs.
During his career, Gleason received a nomination for an Academy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and five Primetime Emmy Awards.
Gleason was born Herbert Walton Gleason Jr. on February 26, 1916, at 364 Chauncey Street in the Stuyvesant Heights (now Bedford–Stuyvesant) section of Brooklyn. He was later baptized as "John Herbert Gleason" and grew up at 328 Chauncey Street, Apartment 1A (an address he later used for Ralph and Alice Kramden on The Honeymooners).
His parents were Herbert Walton "Herb" Gleason (1883–1964), born in New York City to an Irish father and an American mother, and Mae Agnes "Maisie" (née Kelly; 1886–1935), an Irish immigrant from Farranree, County Cork. Gleason was the younger of two children; his elder brother, Clement, died from complications of meningitis at age 14 in 1919.
Gleason remembered Clement and his father having "beautiful handwriting". He watched his father work at the family's kitchen table, writing insurance policies in the evenings. On the night of December 14, 1925, Gleason's father disposed of any family photos in which he appeared; just after noon on December 15, he collected his hat, coat, and paycheck, and permanently left his family and job at the insurance company. Once it became evident that he was not coming back, Mae went to work as a subway attendant for the Brooklyn–Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT).
After his father abandoned the family, young Gleason began hanging around with a local gang, hustling pool. He attended P.S. 73 Elementary School in Brooklyn, John Adams High School in Queens, and Bushwick High School in Brooklyn. Gleason became interested in performing after being part of a class play; he quit school before graduating and got a job that paid $4 per night (equivalent to $99 in 2025) as master of ceremonies at a theater. Other jobs he held at that time included pool hall worker, stunt driver, and carnival barker.
Gleason and his friends made the rounds of the local theaters; he put an act together with one of his friends, and the pair performed on an amateur night at the Halsey Theater, where Gleason replaced his friend Sammy Birch as master of ceremonies. He performed the same duties twice a week at the Folly Theater.
Gleason was 19 when his mother died in 1935 from complications of sepsis from a large neck carbuncle that young Jackie had tried to lance. He had nowhere to go and 36 cents to his name. The family of his first girlfriend, Julie Dennehy, offered to take him in; Gleason, however, was headstrong and insisted that he was going into the heart of the city.
His friend Birch made room for him in the hotel room he shared with another comedian. Birch also told him of a week-long gig in Reading, Pennsylvania, which would pay $19—more money than Gleason could imagine (equivalent to $440 in 2025). The booking agent advanced his bus fare for the trip against his salary, granting Gleason his first job as a professional comedian. Following this, he would always have regular work in small clubs.
Gleason worked his way up to larger clubs in Manhattan, first Leon and Eddie's and then Jack White's madcap Club 18, where insulting the patrons was the order of the day. Gleason greeted noted skater Sonja Henie by handing her an ice cube and saying, "Okay, now do something."
"He has an uncanny instinct for hauling willing laughs from paying guests," reported a newspaper columnist in 1941. "His unsmiling, watchful countenance reminds one of a portly Romeo being rebuffed. Audiences instinctively trust him for laughs and are rarely let down. The man can even insult people and make them like it."
By age 24, Gleason began appearing in motion pictures, under the name Jackie C. Gleason (the middle initial standing for Clement, in tribute to his late brother). When director Lloyd Bacon visited the Club 18, Gleason took him aside and asked for a chance in pictures.
Gleason then took the nightclub floor and began heckling Bacon, which convinced the director to bring Gleason to Hollywood. Gleason signed with Warner Bros. (at $250 a week) for Bacon's Navy Blues (1941) with Ann Sheridan and Martha Raye. Gleason's other major Warner credit was the Humphrey Bogart feature All Through the Night (1942), which also featured a young Phil Silvers. Warners cast Gleason in four more films of diminishing importance; one of them, Lady Gangster (1942) had Gleason as a getaway-car driver for a gang of bank bandits.
In the wake of Abbott and Costello, most of the movie studios tried to imitate the team's military comedies. Warners loaned Gleason to Columbia Pictures, where he was paired with nightclub and movie comic Jack Durant for the Army comedy Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1942). Gleason accepted another loan-out to Twentieth Century-Fox, where Gleason played Glenn Miller's bass player in Orchestra Wives (1942). He had a modest part as an actor's agent in the 1942 Betty Grable–Harry James musical Springtime in the Rockies. Warners had no further plans for Gleason and did not renew his contract.
Gleason had supplemented his movie salary by signing a $150-a-week deal to appear at Maxie Rosenbloom's popular nightclub. "He was a smash hit," wrote biographer W. J. Weatherby, "but none of the Hollywood executives who congratulated him offered him a movie role worthy of his talent." At the end of 1942, Gleason and Lew Parker led a large cast of entertainers in the roadshow production of Olsen and Johnson's New 1943 Hellzapoppin. He also became known for hosting all-night parties in his hotel suite; the hotel soundproofed his suite out of consideration for its other guests.