Actor met his match with Lou Grant. Twice.
An actor can flourish across an entire career without finding the role that truly understands him.
Ed Asner, who recently died at 91, found his:
Lou Grant, the surly, sneaky-avuncular news director of WJM-TV on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Prior to that show — one of a sterling handful of situation comedies we’ll be revisiting decades from now — the son of an Orthodox Jewish Kansas City junkman worked hard, and not always gratifyingly, in a decade (the 1960s) dominated for him by supporting heavies and brusque, salt-of-the-earth authority figures.
Asner faced the camera, or a fellow actor, like the onetime high school football tackle he was. All business. Ready to charge. He had the stuff while rarely having the material to maximize it.
He could hold his own with old-guard Hollywood stars, as he did with John Wayne and Robert Mitchum in the 1967 Howard Hawks Western “El Dorado” (1967). He plays a generic bad guy well there, delivering a small part with focused intensity, an expressive glower in occasional close-up and (the bonus) a sly sense of a malevolent side character messing with the leading players’ heads.
“I was afraid of comedy,” Asner used to say in interviews. On stage, he hated the way laughs came easily in one performance, only to vanish the following night. In a 1998 A&E “Biography” special devoted to Asner, “Mary Tyler Moore Show” executive producer Allan Burns described Asner’s initial audition for Lou Grant as “the worst reading in the history of show business.” Flat. Humorless. No spunk. But despite
Moore’s own initial misgivings, he and Lou became one. The second he landed the “spunk” payoff line in the show’s pilot, Asner knew something had just happened. Things were going to be different after that.
Lou Grant made a uniquely daring transition from half-hour sitcom (1970-77) to the CBS-TV spinoff “Lou Grant” (197782). The actor who played him became a beloved TV superstar, winning seven Emmy Awards during those years, two of them for his work on the biggest miniseries of the ’70s:
“Rich Man, Poor Man” and “Roots.”
Then something else happened, not suddenly but gradually. Asner’s leftist, advertiser-unfriendly political activism, particularly
his championing of the El Salvadoran revolutionaries fighting the U.S.-backed military junta, put him squarely at odds with some of his fellow Screen Actors Guild constituents during his tenure as SAG president.
As a young, striving Chicago actor, as Asner recalled in the documentary “Compass Cabaret 55,” the junkman’s son bounced out of the University of Chicago after a year and a half, working various job and acting when he could. He stayed quiet about the anti-Communist Hollywood blacklist.
Once “Lou Grant” left the air in 1982, with CBS citing low ratings though they were still pretty high, Asner rarely stayed quiet about his beliefs.
He credited his early stage work as the spark that
lit the fire.
“He really is a Chicago story. That’s where he came into contact with the idea of being an actor,” said Dexter Bullard, head of graduate acting at The Theatre School at DePaul University. Bullard directed Asner in the 2012 Broadway production of Craig Wright’s “Grace.”
“He was an actor. Not a comedian. Not a celebrity. Not a personality. An actor. And he treated people with deep, deep respect,” Bullard said. “His gruff side, which is definitely in Lou Grant — that’s just one mode of him. In person there’s just this golden heart, a die-hard progressive who always stuck to his principles.”
Asner roomed with Mike Nichols for a short time in the early 1950s, around the time Nichols directed him in William Butler Yeats’ “Purgatory” on campus. When Paul Sills opened the Playwrights Theatre Club on North LaSalle Street, the troupe included Nichols, Elaine May, Barbara Harris and Asner. Three of them were supernaturally gifted improvisers; Asner, not so much.
“For me, acting was therapy,” he once said. “I was not pleased with who I was.” Those early years were full of tumult and rejection. He left the U. of C. because his grades weren’t good, and he was dating someone who wasn’t Jewish, and for those two facts, his parents cut him off financially.
Decades later, Asner gave away a lot of his money to cause after cause after cause. The Ed Asner Family Foundation remains part of his legacy. Another is his passion for labor organizing. As his “Mary Tyler Moore Show” comrade Gavin McLeod, who died earlier this year, says in the 1998 “Biography” special: “He had a heart for the rank and file.”
That “Biography” segment is extremely misleading today; it implies Asner was essentially done with his stardom before the 21st century and had already settled into cranky semiretirement, a life of protests with a second marriage on the horizon (that one didn’t last, either).
But in so many ways, time was good to Asner until the end. He got hot again and stayed active. He was a gas on Twitter. He’d already won millions of new fans by way of two unusually good family pictures early in the new century, playing a wryly disgruntled Santa Claus in “Elf ” (2003) and voicing Carl in Disney/Pixar’s lovely “Up” (2009). He did voiceover work and guest spots in dozens of comedies and dramas, plus the occasional film.
And he toured in a one-man show about Franklin Delano Roosevelt well into his 80s.
There’s a photo of
Asner visiting the Chicago Tribune newsroom in 1978, early in the run of “Lou Grant.” He’s shaking hands with city editor Bernie Judge, while day city editor Donald Agrella smiles. The newsroom — the rank and file — was awed by Asner’s presence, and by what he bellowed, good-naturedly, to the reporters present: “All right, you turkeys! Get to work!” Many say Agrella was a model for the second, hourlong iteration of Lou Grant.
Real-life inspirations aside: It was Lou Grant who sparked Ed Asner. Magically, indelibly, it worked the other way too.