Illness and Death
Gleason smoked four packs of cigarettes a day. He was touring in the lead role of Larry Gelbart's play Sly Fox in 1978 when he suffered chest pains, forcing him to leave the show in Chicago and undergo triple-bypass surgery. Gleason initially went to the hospital for chest pains, but was treated and released. After he suffered another bout the following week, it was determined that heart surgery was necessary.
Gleason delivered a critically acclaimed performance as an infirm, acerbic and somewhat Archie Bunker-like character in the Tom Hanks comedy-drama Nothing in Common (1986). The film proved to be Gleason's final film role, since he was suffering from colon cancer, liver cancer, and thrombosed hemorrhoids during production. “I won’t be around much longer”, he told his daughter at dinner one evening after a day of filming. Gleason kept his medical problems private, although there were rumors that he was seriously ill. A year later, on June 24, 1987, Gleason died at his Florida home.
After a private funeral mass at the Cathedral of Saint Mary in Miami, Gleason was interred in an outdoor mausoleum at Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Cemetery in Miami. At the base is the inscription, "And Away We Go."
Read more about this topic: Jackie Gleason
Famous quotes containing the words illness and, illness and/or death:
“... how I understand that love of living, of being in this wonderful, astounding world even if one can look at it only through the prison bars of illness and suffering! Plus je vois, the more I am thrilled by the spectacle.”
—Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
“Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift.... The self is malleable but elastic, snapping back to its original shape like a rubber band. Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.”
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“Fatigue dulls the pain, but awakes enticing thoughts of death. So! that is the way in which you are tempted to overcome your loneliness—by making the ultimate escape from life..—No! It may be that death is to be your ultimate gift to life: it must not be an act of treachery against it.”
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