Ed Asner, the seven-time Emmy Award-winning actor best known for portraying gruff newsman Lou Grant on two different, iconic television shows, died Sunday, his family and a representative announced Sunday.
He was 91.
Asner, who also endeared himself to a new generation of fans by playing a grumpy Santa in the 2003 movie “Elf” and was the voice the grieving widower in the animated 2009 movie “Up,” was with his kin when he died.
“We are sorry to say that our beloved patriarch passed away this morning peacefully,” his family said on Twitter. “Words cannot express the sadness we feel. With a kiss on your head — Goodnight dad. We love you.”
Asner’s representative, Charles Sherman, told NBC News in a statement on Sunday that he “passed away today peacefully surrounded by family.”
Inducted into the Emmys Hall of Fame in 1996, Asner took home seven statues in his long acting career — five of them for portraying Grant. He won consecutive Emmys for best supporting actor in a comedy series in 1971 and 1972, playing Grant on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
Balding and burly, Grant was a journeyman character actor before he was paired-up with Mary Tyler Moore, who played the perpetually earnest lead character Mary Richards at the fictional Minneapolis TV newsroom where they both worked. And it was TV magic right from the start.
In the first episode of “MTM,” Asner’s Grant appears to compliment Moore’s Richards: “You know what? You got spunk.”
As the bashful Richards soaked up that apparent accolade, Asner’s Grant growled back with a piece of comic timing that’s still revered in TV history: “I hate spunk!”
“This is a stinking lie because I love spunk,” Asner told “TODAY’s” Al Roker in 2017, joyfully reflecting on that famous scene.
The character was so popular that when “MTM” ended its great run in 1977, the grouchy Grant was revived as newspaper man “Lou Grant” that very fall. In that show, Asner’s Grant was city editor of the fictional Los Angeles Tribune for five seasons.
He was the same grouch but this time in a dramatic show.
And he was still a hit, as Asner took home Emmy honors for best lead actor in a drama series for “Lou Grant” in 1978 and 1980
The Grant character worked because everyone knows such a lovable and sage grump, Asner told “TODAY.”
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“He’s the avuncular person we all know in life who we tolerate at first and then learn that he’s not such a monster,” Asner told Roker.
Few roles, comedy or drama, were beyond Asner’s wide range.
He won a 1977 Emmy for best single performance by a supporting actor, playing a slave ship captain in the seminal drama “Roots.”
Asner also took home a 1976 Emmy for best lead actor for a single performance, playing the father in the hit mini-series “Rich Man, Poor Man.”
Younger movie fans embraced Asner as the voice of cranky widower Carl Fredricksen in the 2009 Oscar-nominated animated movie “Up.”
At the time of “Up’s” success, Asner said he wished there were more roles for older actors.
“I keep telling people that I’m a better actor now than I’ve ever been in my life, in my ability to choose and my ability to interpret,” Asner said.
“I’d say most people are probably in that same boat, old people, and it’s a shame that they’re not given the opportunity to demonstrate that intelligence along with their emotion, that it’s not utilized.”
Looking back on his long career, Asner said he had no preference between comedy or drama — but admitted he enjoyed immediate gratification of audience laughter.
“I never thought I was good at comedy. When I found out I could get some laughs I concentrated on it,” Asner told WGN radio in April, 2020. “It’s (comedy) much more rewarding, I must say. In drama it’s quiet, you think the point is sinking it. It’s possible they’re just asleep.”
Asner’s more recent roles include appearances on series “Grace and Frankie, “Cobra Kai” and “Dead to Me.”
Never shy to express his opinion, Asner was one of Hollywood’s leading liberal voices. As president of the Screen Actors Guild between 1981 and 1985, Asner was highly critical of one of his predecessors as SAG president, Ronald Reagan.
The actor has long blamed conservative activists connected to Reagan with the surprising 1982 cancellation of “Lou Grant.” Not long before the show was taken off the air, Asner outraged conservatives by helpng from a group that rushed medical supplies to rebels in El Salvador.
Over the years, Asner spoke passionately about civil rights, gun control, organized labor, separation of church and state and in opposition to capital punishment.
“Oh, I don’t think there’s any question” political activism brought a pre-mature end to “Lou Grant,” Asner told the Desert News in late 1990. “I was sorry to get the show canceled because of it. But I’m not sorry I took a stand.”
Yitzhak Edward Asner was born on Nov. 15, 1929 in Kansas City, the son of Lizzie Seliger and Morris David Asner, Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland. Accepted at the University of Chicago, Asner dropped out after a year to become an actor, a quest that was interrupted by a two-year stint in the U.S. Army from 1951 to 1953.
Grant also won five Golden Globes, one for “Rich Man, Poor Man” and two each for the two series in which he played Lou Grant.
Asner had four children: Matthew, Kate and Liza Asner, his three offspring with first wife Nancy Sykes; and Charles Answer, a son he had with then-partner Carol Vogelman.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
