From a Washington Post obit by Emily Langer headlined “Ed Asner, actor who twice had the role of a lifetime as newsman Lou Grant, dies at 91”:
The son of an immigrant junk dealer, Mr. Asner had a fireplug build, jowly countenance and workingman’s appearance that are not traditionally considered the raw materials of stardom. Those attributes were perfect, however, for the gruff, middle-aged news director of WJM-TV, the fictional Minneapolis television station at the center of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
Widely regarded as one of the finest sitcoms in TV history, the program aired on CBS from 1970 to 1977 and starred Mary Tyler Moore as Mary Richards, an earnest assistant producer who became a generational ideal of the single working woman. Mr. Asner, then in his 40s, played Mary’s crusty boss and was catapulted to fame in the midst of a decades-long acting career that would include hundreds of TV and movie credits.
Besides Mr. Asner and Moore, the cast included a host of first-rate character actors: Gavin MacLeod as Murray Slaughter, the long-suffering news writer; Ted Knight as Ted Baxter, the pompous anchor; Betty White as Sue Ann Nivens, hostess of the TV station’s “Happy Homemaker” program; and Valerie Harper as Mary’s self-deprecating neighbor and friend Rhoda Morgenstern.
With a single exchange in the first episode, “Mr. Grant,” as Mary always called him, was installed in the annals of TV comedy.
“You know what?” he asks Mary, his new hire, her perfectly coiffed hair in laughable contrast to his loosened tie. “You’ve got spunk.”
“Well, yes … ” she replies, blushingly modest, to which Mr. Asner barks his memorable punch line:
“I hate spunk.”
Between its original broadcast and reruns, the show endeared itself to millions and ended with a plotline in which new management fires the newsroom crew, with the ludicrous exception of Ted. After a tearful speech by Lou — “I treasure you people” — the staff shuffles in a group-hug to a box of Kleenex and then files out, with Mary left to turn off the lights.
When “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” ended in 1977, Mr. Asner’s character was reimagined as a hard-charging Los Angeles newspaper editor in“Lou Grant,” a CBS drama that addressed issues such as overseas dictatorship, nuclear power and the mental health of Vietnam War veterans. Nancy Marchand played a fictional publisher modeled in part on Katharine Graham of The Washington Post.
Mr. Asner’s comedic role turned into one with serious themes and dramatic nuance. He received five Primetime Emmy Awards as Lou Grant — three for supporting actor in a comedy and two for lead actor in a drama.
“ ‘Lou Grant’ is the best new show of the season,” Washington Post television critic Tom Shales wrote in 1977. “Like the man in the title, it is a bracing, reassuring combination of an essentially gentle spirit and good, old-fashioned guts. This may be not only what television needs, but what America needs.”
CBS canceled “Lou Grant” in 1982, citing declining ratings. Many observers, including Mr. Asner, suspected that the true cause was his real-world political activism.
Mr. Asner was prominently involved in the Screen Actors Guild strike over wages and profit-sharing in 1980 and was SAG president from 1981 to 1985. During that time, he criticized President Ronald Reagan for sending military aid to the right-wing government in El Salvador and helped raise funds for medical supplies for leftist rebels there.
Those activities, Newsweek magazine reported, “stirred up the hottest Hollywood political dispute since Jane Fonda’s wartime visit to North Vietnam.”
“I had no idea I was so cute,” Mr. Asner quipped.
Reagan, a former actor and head of SAG, said that he was “very disturbed” by Mr. Asner’s work. Another erstwhile SAG chief, the actor and future NRA president Charlton Heston, accused Mr. Asner of injecting politics into the union and using it “like some Mafia don.”
Mr. Asner — who had a bodyguard for a period — said that he was not acting on behalf of the union and that he was “exercising [his] right to free speech.”
“I’m not an expert, but I’m a citizen who can read,” he said. “I think I know enough to make judgments, and I think we’re on the wrong side. I think we’ve ended up on the wrong side too many times in too many places.”…
In a foreword to a book about “Lou Grant” by author Douglass K. Daniel, Mr. Asner wrote that the drama was one of his proudest accomplishments as an actor.
“I knew, at the time, that we were doing exceptional and important work that had the power to make changes in our world. That may sound egotistical; it was, after all, just a television show,” he wrote.
“Consider, though, that … a prime-time show reaches 40 million homes,” he continued. “ ‘Lou Grant’ has been seen in 72 countries; in many of them, the very idea of freedom of the press is amazing. That kind of power gives my industry an obligation to be responsible for what we produce, and, in that regard, ‘Lou Grant’ was exemplary.”
Mr. Asner — some sources reported his given name as Yitzak — was born in Kansas City, Mo., and grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home on the Kansas side of the border. He played football and worked on his high school newspaper and in radio before attending the University of Chicago, where he became involved in drama.
After serving in the Army Signal Corps in the early 1950s, he was invited by theatrical director Paul Sills, who had seen him act in college, to join the Playwrights Theatre Club in Chicago. Mr. Asner performed there with actors including Mike Nichols and Barbara Harris; he left when the group ventured increasingly into improvisation.
Mr. Asner moved to New York, acting in Shakespeare festivals and in a staging of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Threepenny Opera” before concluding that he could earn a more stable living as a TV actor in California. His early television work, heavy on crime dramas, included appearances on “The Untouchables,” “Felony Squad,” “The F.B.I.” and “The Mod Squad.”
Television producer Grant Tinker, then married to Mary Tyler Moore, saw a TV movie in which Mr. Asner played a police chief and invited him to audition for the part of Lou Grant.
Mr. Asner also received Primetime Emmys for performances in two acclaimed miniseries, first as an embittered German immigrant baker who immigrates to the United States in “Rich Man, Poor Man” (1976), based on the Irwin Shaw novel, and as a slave ship captain in “Roots” (1977), based on the Alex Haley book.
His early films included “The Slender Thread” (1965) with Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft, in which he played a detective searching for a suicidal caller to a crisis hotline, and “El Dorado” (1966), a John Wayne western. Mr. Asner later portrayed a police officer in “Fort Apache, the Bronx” (1981), a drama starring Paul Newman about a troubled precinct station house, and appeared as an FBI operative in director Oliver Stone’s “JFK” (1991).
To a later generation of movie viewers, he may be better remembered as Santa Claus in “Elf” with Will Ferrell and as the voice of the cranky widower Carl Fredricksen in “Up” (2009). He also portrayed investor Warren Buffett in a 2011 HBO production, “Too Big to Fail.”
Mr. Asner performed on Broadway as a rude, millionaire junk dealer in a 1989 revival of Garson Kanin’s “Born Yesterday.” In Craig Wright’s “Grace” (2012), also on Broadway, he played a German-born exterminator whose family died during the Nazi regime and whose wife is succumbing to cancer….
“I’m very proud of what I’ve done,” Mr. Asner once told an interviewer, reflecting on his acting and political activism. “There were times when I felt terribly alone, when I wished the stormtroopers would come and rescue me. But I was also given a feeling of nobility about my life. How do you buy that?”
Emily Langer is a reporter on The Washington Post’s obituaries desk. She writes about extraordinary lives in national and international affairs, science and the arts, sports, culture, and beyond.
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