Actor Red Buttons, 87-year-old comic

LOS ANGELES — 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, has died. He was 87.

Mr. Buttons died Thursday 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 a hit on television in 1952 with the launch of "The Red Buttons Show" on CBS.

He won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for best supporting actor for his role as the tragic Joe Kelly in the 1957 screen adaptation of James Michener's novel "Sayonara," starring Marlon Brando.

"I'm a little guy," Mr. Buttons said at the time, "and that's what I play all the time — a little guy and his troubles."

Mr. Buttons appeared in more than 30 movies, including "Hatari!" "The Longest Day," "Harlow," "Stagecoach" (1966 remake), "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" "The Poseidon Adventure," "18 Again!" and "It Could Happen to You."

In 1966, he starred in the short-lived situation comedy "The Double Life of Henry Phyfe," in which he played a bookkeeper who is asked to pose as a secret agent.

Mr. Buttons never equaled his early TV success or the high of his Oscar win, but he also never stopped working. He appeared in TV movies and specials and made frequent series guest appearances. He had a stint on "Knots Landing" in the 1980s and recurring roles on "Roseanne" in the '90s and in the Showtime series "Street Time" in 2002.

In the 1970s, he made frequent appearances on "The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast" shows, in which Mr. Buttons would begin his portion of the proceedings by noting, "Some of the most famous people in history never got a dinner!"

Born Aaron Chwatt in New York on Feb. 5, 1919, Mr. Buttons spent his early years in tenements on the Lower East Side, the same poor neighborhood that had spawned Eddie Cantor, George Burns, Jimmy Durante, Fannie Brice and George and Ira Gershwin.

His father, a Polish immigrant who made hats for a living, sparked his early desire to get into show business.

"He was a clown who liked to sing and dance," Mr. Buttons told Newsday in 1995. "I picked that up from him. I noticed he made people happy, smiling, laughing, and that's what I wanted to do."

In 1935, at age 16, he landed a job as a bellboy and singer at Dinty Moore's Tavern on City Island in the Bronx. Customers, seeing his red hair and uniform festooned with brass buttons, gave him the nickname "Red Buttons" that became his professional moniker.

That summer, Buttons made his first appearance on the Borscht Circuit — in exchange for room and board, he entertained at Greenfield Park in New York's Catskill Mountains.

"I love to make 'em laugh. I love to hear 'em laugh. I love to entertain," he told Back Stage magazine. "That's my life. It's always been my life."