Actor specialized in smarmy villains
Roles in Tootsie, 9 to 5 were career-defining
• Dabney Coleman, the mustachioed character actor who specialized in smarmy villains like the chauvinist boss in 9 to 5 and the nasty TV director in Tootsie, has died. He was 92.
Coleman died Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., his daughter, Quincy Coleman, said. She said he “took his last earthly breath peacefully and exquisitely.”
“The great Dabney Coleman literally created, or defined, really — in a uniquely singular way — an archetype as a character actor. He was so good at what he did it's hard to imagine movies and television of the last 40 years without him,” Ben Stiller wrote on X.
For two decades Coleman laboured in movies and TV shows as a talented but largely unnoticed performer. That changed abruptly in 1976 when he was cast as the incorrigibly corrupt mayor of the hamlet of Fernwood in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a satirical soap opera that was so over the top no network would touch it.
Producer Norman Lear finally managed to syndicate the show. It quickly became a cult favourite. Coleman's character, Mayor Merle Jeeter, was especially popular and his masterful, comic deadpan delivery did not go overlooked by film and network executives.
A 6-footer with an ample black moustache, Coleman went on to make his mark in numerous popular films, including as a stressed out computer scientist in War Games, Tom Hanks' father in You've Got Mail and a fire fighting official in The Towering Inferno.
He won a Golden Globe for The Slap Maxwell Story and an Emmy Award for best supporting actor in Peter Levin's 1987 small screen legal drama Sworn to Silence.
Some of his recent credits include Ray Donovan and a recurring role on Boardwalk Empire, for which he won two Screen Actors Guild Awards.
In the groundbreaking 1980 hit 9 to 5, he was the “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” boss who tormented his unappreciated female underlings — Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton — until they turned the tables on him.
Opposite Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, he was the obnoxious director of a daytime soap opera that Hoffman's character joins by pretending to be a woman.