Ed Asner
Eddie Asner was an American actor. He is most notable for portraying Lou Grant on the sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show and drama Lou Grant, making him one of the few television actors to portray the same character in both a comedy and a drama.
Asner won seven Primetime Emmy Awards, the most of any male performer. Five were for portraying Lou Grant: three as Supporting Actor in a Comedy Television Series on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and two as Lead Actor in a Dramatic Television Series on the spin-off Lou Grant. The other two were for performances in the miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man and Roots.
Asner acted in the films El Dorado, They Call Me Mister Tibbs!, Fort Apache, The Bronx, JFK, and Too Big to Fail. He also played Santa Claus in several films and voiced Carl Fredricksen in the Pixar animated film Up.
Asner starred in the ABC sitcom Thunder Alley, and Michael: Every Day. He also acted extensively in numerous television series such as The Practice, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, The Good Wife, Cobra Kai, Briarpatch, Working Class, and Dead to Me. He also voiced J. Jonah Jameson in Spider-Man: The Animated Series, Hudson in Gargoyles, and Ed Wuncler Sr. in The Boondocks.
Early life and education
Asner was born November 15, 1929, in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in Kansas City, Kansas. His parents, Lizzie, a housewife, and Morris David Asner, were Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Ukraine who ran a second-hand shop and junkyard. His four older siblings were Ben J. Asner, Eve Asner, Esther Edelman and Labe Asner. He was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family and given the Hebrew name Yitzhak.Asner attended Wyandotte High School in Kansas City, Kansas, and the University of Chicago. He studied journalism in Chicago until a professor advised him there was little money to be made in the profession. He had been working in a steel mill, but he quickly switched to drama, debuting as the martyred Thomas Becket in a campus production of T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. He eventually dropped out of school, going to work as a taxi driver, worked on the assembly line for General Motors, and other odd jobs before being drafted in the military in 1951.
Asner served with the United States Army Signal Corps from 1951 to 1953 during the Korean War and appeared in plays that toured army bases in Europe.
Career
1955–1969: Early work and television roles
Following his military service, Asner helped found the Playwrights Theatre Company in Chicago, but left for New York City before members of that company regrouped as the Compass Players in the mid-1950s. He later made frequent guest appearances with the successor to Compass, The Second City. In New York City, Off-Broadway roles included Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum in the revival of Threepenny Opera and in Otway's Venice Preserv'd in late 1955. Asner scored his first Broadway role in Face of a Hero alongside Jack Lemmon in 1960, and began to make inroads as a television actor, having made his TV debut in 1957 on Studio One. In two notable performances on television, Asner played Detective Sgt. Thomas Siroleo in the 1963 episode of The Outer Limits titled "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork" and the reprehensible ex-premier Brynov in the 1965 Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea episode "The Exile". He made his film debut in 1962, in the Elvis Presley vehicle Kid Galahad.Before landing his role with Mary Tyler Moore, Asner guest-starred in television series including four episodes of The Untouchables starring Robert Stack, the syndicated crime drama Decoy, starring Beverly Garland, two episodes of Naked City in 1961, and Route 66 in 1962 as Custody Officer Lincoln Peers. He was cast on Jack Lord's ABC drama series Stoney Burke and in the series finale of CBS's The Reporter, starring Harry Guardino. He also appeared on Mr. Novak, Ben Casey, Gunsmoke, Mission: Impossible, The Outer Limits, The Fugitive, and The Invaders. In 1963, Asner appeared as George Johnson on The Virginian in the episode "Echo of Another Day". In 1968 he was the villain Furman Crotty in the Wild Wild West episode "The Night of the Amnesiac".
1970–1982: ''The Mary Tyler Moore Show'' and ''Lou Grant''
Asner was best known for his character Lou Grant, who was first introduced on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1970. In 1977, after Moore's series ended, Asner's character was given his own show, Lou Grant. In contrast to the Mary Tyler Moore series, a thirty-minute award-winning comedy about television journalism, the Lou Grant series was an hour-long award-winning drama about newspaper journalism. For his role as Grant, Asner was one of only two actors to win an Emmy Award for a sitcom and a drama for the same role. In addition he made appearances as Lou Grant on two other shows: Rhoda and Roseanne. Other television series starring Asner in regular roles include Thunder Alley, The Bronx Zoo, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. He also starred in one episode of the Western series Dead Man's Gun, as well as portraying art smuggler August March in an episode of the original Hawaii Five-O and reprised the role in the Hawaii Five-0 remake. He also appeared as a streetwise veteran police officer in an episode of the 1973 version of Police Story.Asner was acclaimed for his role in the ABC miniseries Roots, as Captain Davies, the morally conflicted captain of the Lord Ligonier, the slave ship that brought Kunta Kinte to America. The role earned Asner an Emmy Award, as did the similarly dark role of Axel Jordache in the miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man. In contrast, he played a former pontiff in the lead role of Papa Giovanni: Ioannes XXIII, an Italian television film for RAI.
1983–2009: Established actor and voice work
Asner had an extensive voice acting career. In 1987, he played the eponymous character, George F. Babbitt, in the L.A. Classic Theatre Works' radio theater production of Sinclair Lewis' novel Babbitt. Asner won one Audie Award and was nominated for two Grammy Awards and an additional Audie for his audiobook work. He also provided the voices for Joshua on Joshua and the Battle of Jericho for Hanna-Barbera, J. Jonah Jameson on the 1990s animated television series Spider-Man: The Animated Series ; Hoggish Greedly on Captain Planet and the Planeteers ; Hudson on Gargoyles ; Jabba the Hutt on the radio version of Star Wars; Master Vrook from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel; Roland Daggett on Batman: The Animated Series ; Cosgrove on Freakazoid!; Ed Wuncler on The Boondocks ; and Granny Goodness in various DC Comics animated series. He also voiced Napoleon, Cornelia's younger sister's cat in the Disney show W.I.T.C.H., and Kid Potato, the Butcher's dad in the PBS Kids hit show WordGirl. He was even nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Performer in an Animated Program but lost to Eartha Kitt for Nick Jr.'s Wonder Pets!. Asner provided the voice of famed American orator Edward Everett in the 2017 documentary film The Gettysburg Address.Asner provided the voice of the main protagonist Carl Fredricksen in the Academy Award-winning Pixar film Up. He received critical acclaim for the role, with one critic going so far as to suggest "They should create a new category for this year's Academy Award for Best Vocal Acting in an Animated Film and name Asner as the first recipient." He appeared in the mid- to late-2000s decade in a recurring segment on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, entitled "Does This Impress Ed Asner?"
Asner appeared in several Hallmark movies, and he was nominated for an Emmy® for the 2006 Hallmark Original Movie The Christmas Card.
In 2001, Asner was the recipient of the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. Asner won more Emmy Awards for performing than any other male actor. In 1996, he was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame.
2010–2021: Later roles
In June 2010, Asner was cast in a Country Music Television comedy pilot, Regular Joe. In July 2010, Asner completed recording sessions for Shattered Hopes: The True Story of the Amityville Murders; a documentary on the 1974 DeFeo murders in Amityville, New York. Asner served as the narrator for the film, which covers a forensic analysis of the murders, the trial in which 23-year-old DeFeo son Ronald DeFeo Jr., was convicted of the killings, and the subsequent "haunting" story which is revealed to be a hoax. Also in 2010, Asner played the title role in FDR, a stage production about the life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; he subsequently continued to tour the play throughout the country. In January 2011, Asner took a supporting role on CMT's first original sitcom Working Class. He made an appearance in the independent comedy feature Not Another B Movie, and had a role as billionaire Warren Buffett in HBO's economic drama Too Big to Fail. In 2013, he guest starred as Mr. Finger in The Crazy Ones.Asner also provided voice-over narration for many documentaries and films about social activism, including Tiger by the Tail, a documentary film detailing the efforts of Eric Mann and the Campaign to keep General Motors' Van Nuys assembly plant running. He also recorded for a public radio show and podcast, Playing On Air, appearing in Warren Leight's The Final Interrogation of Ceaucescu's Dog with Jesse Eisenberg, and Mike Reiss's New York Story. Asner was the voice-over narrator for the 2016 documentary Behind the Fear: The Hidden Story of HIV, directed by Nicole Zwiren, a controversial study on the AIDS debate. A 2014 documentary titled My Friend Ed, directed by Sharon Baker, focused on the actor's life and career. It won Best Short Documentary at the New York City Independent Film Festival. During interviews for a 2019 book on the history of Chicago theater, Asner told the author he preferred to be credited for his work as "Edward" rather than "Ed" because he felt the longer name held the page or screen better.
In 2018, Asner was cast in the Netflix dark comedy, Dead to Me, which premiered on May 3, 2019. The series also stars Christina Applegate, Linda Cardellini, and James Marsden. Asner also had a recurring guest role in the 2018–2025 series Cobra Kai, portraying Johnny Lawrence's step-father, Sid Weinberg, in seasons one and three. A memorial tribute to Asner preceded the credits in Cobra Kai season 4, episode 1, "Let's Begin". In 2020 he guest starred in an episode of the eleventh and final season of Modern Family and in 2021 played himself in a sketch on Let's Be Real. The 2019 feature documentary by Kurt Jacobsen and Warren Leming entitled Ed Asner: On Stage and Off premiered at the American Documentary Film Festival in Palm Springs, which Asner attended, and since screened at a dozen more festivals, including a European premiere at the Oxford International Film Festival. In 2013, he played Santa in Christmas on the Bayou.
Beginning in 2016, Asner took on the role of Holocaust survivor Milton Saltzman in Jeff Cohen's acclaimed play The Soap Myth in a reading at Lincoln Center's Bruno Walter Theatre in New York City. He subsequently toured for the next three years in "concert readings" of the play in more than a dozen cities across the United States. In 2019, PBS flagship station WNET filmed the concert reading at New York's Center for Jewish History for their All Arts channel. The performance, which is available for free, world-wide live-streaming, co-stars Tovah Feldshuh, Ned Eisenberg, and Liba Vaynberg.
In the week before his death, Asner told his frequent collaborators, Greg Palast and Leni Badpenny, that he soon would be doing three one-act plays.