Ed Asner: Award-winning actor who starred in ‘Lou Grant’ and ‘Up’
Ed Asner, an actor and liberal activist who twice had the role of a lifetime in the character of Lou Grant, the irascible newsman he played first on the hit 1970s sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show and then on an acclaimed spin-off series, has died aged 91.
The son of an immigrant junk dealer, Asner had a fireplug build, jowly countenance and workingman’s semblance that are not traditionally considered the raw materials of stardom. Those attributes were perfect, however, for the gruff, middle-aged news director of WJM-TV, the fictional Minneapolis television station at the centre of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Widely regarded as one of the finest sitcoms in TV history, the programme aired on CBS from 1970 to 1977 and starred Mary Tyler Moore as Mary Richards, an earnest assistant producer who became a generational ideal of the single working woman. Asner, then in his forties, played Mary’s crusty boss and the role launched a decades-long acting career that would include hundreds of TV and movie credits.
With a single exchange in the first episode, “Mr Grant”, as Mary always called him, was installed in the annals of TV comedy.
“You know what?” he asks Mary, his new hire, her perfectly coiffed hair in laughable contrast to his loosened tie. “You've got spunk.”
“Well, yes...” she replies, blushingly modest, to which Asner barks his memorable punch line: “I hate spunk.”
Between its original broadcast and reruns shown on the Nick at Nite channel in the 1990s, the show endeared itself to millions and ended with a plotline in which new management fires the newsroom crew. After a tearful speech by Lou – “I treasure you people” – the staff shuffles in a group-hug to a box of Kleenex and then files out, with Mary left to turn off the lights.
When The Mary Tyler Moore Show ended in 1977, Asner's character was re-imagined as a hard-charging Los Angeles newspaper editor in Lou Grant, a CBS drama that addressed issues such as overseas dictatorship, nuclear power and the mental health of Vietnam War veterans. Nancy Marchand played a fictional publisher modelled in part on Katharine Graham of The Washington Post.
The transition was a rare example of a major comedic character turned into a serious one. Asner received five Primetime Emmy awards as Lou – three for supporting actor in a comedy and two for lead actor in a drama.
“Lou Grant is the best new show of the season,” Washington Post television critic Tom Shales wrote in 1977. “Like the man in the title, it is a bracing, reassuring combination of an essentially gentle spirit and good, old-fashioned guts. This may be not only what television needs, but what America needs.”
CBS cancelled Lou Grant in 1982, citing declining ratings. Many observers, as well as Asner, suspected that the true cause was the leading man’s political activism.
Asner was prominently involved in the Screen Actors Guild strike over wages and profit-sharing in 1980 and was SAG president from 1981 to 1985. During that time, he criticised president Ronald Reagan for sending military aid to the right-wing government in El Salvador and helped raise funds for medical supplies for leftist rebels there.
Those activities, Newsweek magazine reported in 1982, “stirred up the hottest Hollywood political dispute since Jane Fonda's wartime visit to North Vietnam”.
“I had no idea I was so cute,” Asner quipped in response to the comparison.
Reagan, a former actor and head of SAG, said that he was “very disturbed” by Asner's work. Another erstwhile SAG chief, the actor and future NRA president Charlton Heston, accused Asner of injecting politics into the union and using it “like some Mafia don”.
Asner – who had a bodyguard for a period – said that he was not acting on behalf of the union and that he was “exercising [his] right to free speech”.
“I'm not an expert, but I'm a citizen who can read,” he told an interviewer. “I think I know enough to make judgments, and I think we're on the wrong side. I think we've ended up on the wrong side too many times in too many places.”
Asner helped raise money to support the high-profile legal defence of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted in 1982 of killing a Philadelphia police officer. More recently, the actor questioned widely accepted explanations of the 9/11 attacks, opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and appeared in a series of advertisements by the liberal group MoveOn.org targeting then-president George W Bush.
In a foreword to a book about Lou Grant by author Douglass K Daniel, Asner wrote that the drama was one of his proudest accomplishments as an actor.
“I knew, at the time, that we were doing exceptional and important work that had the power to make changes in our world. That may sound egotistical; it was, after all, just a television show,” he wrote.
“Consider, though, that … a prime-time show reaches 40 million homes,” he continued. “Lou Grant has been seen in 72 countries; in many of them, the very idea of freedom of the press is amazing. That kind of power gives my industry an obligation to be responsible for what we produce, and, in that regard, Lou Grant was exemplary.”
Asner – some sources reported his given name as Yitzak – was born 15 November 1929, in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home on the Kansas side of the border. He played football and worked on the radio and newspaper in high school before attending the University of Chicago, where he became involved in drama.
After serving in the Army Signal Corps in the early 1950s, he was invited by theatrical director Paul Sills, who had seen him act in college, to join the Playwrights Theatre Club in Chicago. Asner performed there with actors including Mike Nichols and Barbara Harris; he left when the group ventured increasingly into improvisation.
Asner moved to New York, acting in Shakespeare festivals and in a staging of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera before concluding that he could earn a more stable living as a TV actor in California. His early TV work, heavy on crime dramas, included appearances on the programmes The Untouchables, Felony Squad, The FBI and The Mod Squad.
Television producer Grant Tinker, then married to Mary Tyler Moore, saw a TV movie in which Asner played a police chief and invited him to audition for the part of Lou Grant.
Asner received Primetime Emmys for performances in two acclaimed miniseries, first as an embittered German immigrant baker who immigrates to the United States in Rich Man, Poor Man (1976), based on the Irwin Shaw novel, and as a slave ship captain in Roots (1977), based on the Alex Haley book.
His early films included The Slender Thread (1965) with Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft, in which he played a detective searching for a suicidal caller to a crisis hotline, and El Dorado (1966), a John Wayne western. Asner later portrayed a police officer in Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981), the drama starring Paul Newman about a troubled precinct station house, and appeared as an FBI operative in director Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991).
To a later generation of movie viewers, he may be better remembered as Santa Claus in Elf (2003) with Will Ferrell and as the voice of the cranky widower Carl Fredricksen in Up (2009).
Asner performed on Broadway as a rude, millionaire junk dealer in a 1989 revival of Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday. In Craig Wright's Grace (2012), also on Broadway, he played a German-born exterminator whose family died during the Nazi regime and whose wife is succumbing to cancer.
Asner’s marriages to Nancy Lou Sykes and Cindy Gilmore ended in divorce. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
“I’m very proud of what I’ve done,” Asner once told an interviewer, reflecting on his acting and political activism. “There were times when I felt terribly alone, when I wished the storm-troopers would come and rescue me. But I was also given a feeling of nobility about my life. How do you buy that?”
Ed Asner, actor, born 15 November 1929, died 29 August 2021
© The Washington Post