NOTEWORTHY DEATHS

EL PASO, Texas — Sherman Hemsley, the actor who made the irascible George Jefferson of The Jeffersons one of television’s most memorable characters and a symbol for urbanupward mobility, has died. He was 74.

Police in El Paso, Texas, said late Tuesday that Hemsley was found dead at a local home where neighbors said he’d lived for years.

The actor had been ill and died of natural causes, so no autopsy will be performed, according to Irene Santiago, a manager at the El Paso coroner’s office. She did not elaborate.

The Philadelphia-born Hemsley first played the blustering black Harlem businessman on CBS’ All in the Family before the character was spun off into The Jeffersons, which in 11 seasons from 1975 to 1985 became one of TV’s most successful sitcoms - particularly noteworthy with its mostly black cast.

With the gospel-style theme song of “Movin’ OnUp,” the hit show depicted George and Weezie Jefferson (played by Isabel Sanford), the wealthy former neighbors of Archie and Edith Bunker in Queens, as they made their way on New York’s Upper EastSide. The show often dealt with contemporary issues of racial prejudice, but more frequently reveled in the sitcom archetype of a short-tempered, opinionated patriarch trying, often unsuccessfully, to control his family.

The character, the owner of a chainof dry-cleaning stores, was devised, Hemsley said, as “pompous and feisty.” Despite the character’s many faults, Hemsley managed to make George Jefferson endearing.

“All of it was really hard ... because - rude, I don’t like to be that way,” Hemsley said in a 2003 interview for the Archive of American Television. “But it was the character, I had to do it. I had to be true to the character. If I was to pull back something, then it just wouldn’t work.”