Ed Asner kept coming back to Connecticut

Ed Asner was more than just “Lou Grant” to Connecticut theatergoers. The gruff yet genial character actor delighted local audiences from the very start of his career to right near its end — a span of nearly 60 years.

Asner, best known for playing curmudgeonly TV-and-print news editor Lou Grant in two TV series (the classic sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and the more drama-laden spinoff “Lou Grant”) died Sunday at the age of 91.

The Courant spoke to Asner just two years ago, as he was preparing to come to West Hartford for a reading of Jeff Cohen’s Holocaust-themed drama “The Soap Myth” at the Mandell JCC.

The actor was 29 years old when he spent a summer as a member of the repertory company of the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford. At that point he was a busy New York actor who had already started his television career with shows filmed on the East Coast like “Naked City” and “Studio One.” He would move to Hollywood in the early ‘60s.

He was at Stratford at a pivotal time in the Connecticut theater’s history. Asner played a couple of angry young men — Bardolph in the comedy “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and Sampson in the romantic tragedy “Romeo and Juliet,” as well as a soldier in “All’s Well That Ends Well.” In a 2013 interview with the Courant, Asner likened his place in the company to “a good piece of furniture.” Founding artistic director John Houseman’s own assessment of Asner at Stratford, in a footnote in one of his memoirs, was “sturdy.”

At the time Asner was there, the American Shakespeare Theatre was standing up to the theater and movie industries’ blacklisting of actors with alleged radical political beliefs. It hired known blacklisted professionals — if not as actors or backstage talent then as groundskeepers or gardeners. Asner told the Courant in 2019 that he’d been blacklisted himself at that time, but as it was the waning days of the blacklist, it did not seriously affect his livelihood. “By then, the fever had cooled down,” he said. Much later in his career, Asner would lose work due to his outspoken progressive political beliefs, especially during the time when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild in the early 1980s.

Asner declined an an opportunity to rejoin the American Shakespeare Theatre ensemble for its 1960 season, but he maintained a relationship with the theater that lasted until his death. He championed attempts to reopen the venue and visited Stratford in 2013 to tour the grounds of the long-shuttered building. He also spoke out when the theater building was destroyed by arsonists in January of 2019.

Asner brought his one-man show “FDR” to the Katharine Hepburn