Remembering Ed Asner: How a Chicago-trained ‘heavy’ 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 died Aug. 29 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 oldguard 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 halfhour sitcom (1970-1977) to the CBS-TV spinoff “Lou Grant” (1977-1982). 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.”