Tim Conway's Daughter: Put Me in Charge

The 'Carol Burnett' actor is suffering from dementia
By Neal Colgrass,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 26, 2018 9:38 AM CDT

The actor who made America laugh with the "Oldest Man" and "Mr. Tudball" is suffering from dementia, People reports. Tim Conway, perhaps best known for co-starring in The Carol Burnett Show in the 1970s, is at a nursing facility where he's barely responsive and has others tending to his daily needs, says his daughter Kelly Conway. The actor's wife, Charlene, is "planning to move him out of the excellent skilled nursing facility he is currently at" and put him in a facility that lacks "registered nurses at all times and his 24-hour caregiver and speech therapist (to help with swallowing)," per court documents filed by Kelly in Los Angeles.

Kelly, 56, adds that her father can't "properly provide for his personal needs for physical health, food, and clothing" and remains "almost entirely unresponsive." Kelly is asking the court to make her conservator of her father so she can handle medical matters, as first reported by the Blast. Conway has also starred in McHale's Navy and acted the voice of Barnacle Boy on Spongebob Squarepants. He achieved fame in Hollywood without any background in the industry: "I had no professional training," he said on The Interviews: An Oral History of Television. "I had a sense of humor and had been in front of a microphone." Here's an excerpt of Conway in the famous Carol Burnett Show "dentist sketch." (More dementia stories.)

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