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    Ed Asner, Emmy-Winning Star of ‘Lou Grant’ and ‘Up,’ Dies at 91

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    Best known as the gruff newsman he first played on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” he was also a busy character actor and a political activist.Ed Asner, the burly character actor who won seven Emmy Awards — five of them for playing the same character, the gruff but lovable newsman Lou Grant, introduced on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” — and later starred in film hits like “Up” and “Elf” — died on Sunday at his home in Tarzana, Calif. He was 91.His death was confirmed by his family via Twitter. No cause was specified.Mr. Asner also served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1981 to 1985 and was active in political causes both within and beyond the entertainment industry. The issues he supported over the years included unionism (in particular the air traffic controllers’ strike of 1981) and animal rights; those he protested against included the American military presence in El Salvador.Mr. Asner was 40 when he was approached for the role of Lou Grant, the irascible but idealistic head of the fictional WJM television newsroom in Minneapolis and the boss of Ms. Moore’s Mary Richards. His place in television comedy history was secured when, during the first episode, he told Ms. Moore, an eager young job seeker, “You’ve got spunk,” then paused and added, “I hate spunk.”“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” ran on CBS from 1970 to 1977, and Mr. Asner was nominated for the Emmy for best supporting actor in a comedy series every year. He won in 1971, 1972 and 1975. He went on to win twice for best lead actor, in 1978 and 1980, for the spinoff “Lou Grant,” making him the first performer to have received Emmys for playing the same character in both a comedy and a drama series.“Lou Grant” (1977-82) itself was an unusual case, a drama series developed around a sitcom character. In the show, Mr. Grant returned to his first love, editing a big-city newspaper, and the scripts tackled serious issues that included, in the first season alone, domestic abuse, gang rivalries, neo-Nazi groups, nursing-home scandals and cults.In between playing Lou Grant, Mr. Asner also won Emmys for his appearances in the 1976 mini-series “Rich Man, Poor Man,” as Nick Nolte’s bitter immigrant father, and the groundbreaking, lavishly lauded 1977 mini-series “Roots,” in which he played a slave-ship captain with scruples. He also won five Golden Globes, one for “Rich Man, Poor Man” and two each for the two series in which he played Lou Grant.In more recent years he had been seen in guest roles on television series like “The Good Wife,” “The Middle,” “Grace and Frankie,” “Hot in Cleveland” and “Cobra Kai,” and as recurring characters on “The Practice” and “ER.” In television movies, he played the billionaire Warren Buffett (in “Too Big to Fail,” 2011) and Pope John XXIII (in a 2002 movie by that name).Edward David Asner was born on Nov. 15, 1929, in Kansas City, Mo., and grew up in Kansas City, Kan. He was the youngest of five children of Orthodox Jewish immigrants, Morris David Asner, a junkyard owner from Poland, and Lizzie (Seliger) Asner, from Russia.As a boy, Mr. Asner became interested in dramatics and worked on a school radio program. After high school he was accepted at the University of Chicago, but dropped out after a year and a half to work at odd jobs — taxi driver, encyclopedia salesman, metal finisher at an auto plant — while he tried to build an acting career..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1gp0zvr{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;margin-bottom:25px;}In 1951 he was drafted into the Army and sent to France. Mustered out in 1953, he returned to Chicago to work with the Playwrights Theater Club and the Compass Players, a precursor of the Second City comedy troupe. But he soon moved to New York, where he found work onstage (a small part in “The Threepenny Opera” at the Theater de Lys in Greenwich Village and a short-lived Broadway play, “Face of a Hero,” starring Jack Lemmon) and in a handful of television shows.Moving to California in 1961, he found the acting jobs more lucrative, and was cast in a short-lived CBS political drama, “Slattery’s People,” starring Richard Crenna. He made a point of largely avoiding comedy — out of fear, he said in a 2002 appearance at Vanderbilt University, and because “in those days you got discovered by doing the drama shows as a guest star.” But he agreed to audition for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” because, as he said in an Archive of American Television interview, Lou Grant “was the best character I’d ever been asked to do” in either television or film.Mr. Asner as Lou Grant with Mary Tyler Moore in a scene from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” He won three Emmys for his portrayal on the show, and two more when the character moved to his own dramatic series.CBSLou was a hard-drinking, straight-shooting, short-tempered journalist who had tender emotions but did not plan to show them; a strong aura of professional and personal integrity; a fear that he had outlived his era; and “a great common core of honor,” as Mr. Asner told Robert S. Alley and Irby B. Brown, the authors of “Love Is All Around: The Making of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show.’”In the post-Lou Grant era, Mr. Asner worked on both screen and stage. He returned to Broadway in 1989 to play the pugnacious Harry Brock opposite Madeline Kahn in a revival of “Born Yesterday.” His last Broadway play was “Grace” (2012), a tale of gospel-themed motels and murder, in which he played an exterminator.He provided the voice of the lead character in the Oscar-winning animated movie “Up” (2009), about an elderly widower who flies to South America by attaching roughly a zillion colorful balloons to his house. Manohla Dargis’s review in The New York Times, which praised Mr. Asner and the supporting characters — including a portly stowaway scout and several talking dogs — called it “filmmaking at its purest.”Mr. Asner also played a levelheaded Santa Claus in the Will Ferrell comedy “Elf” (2003), about a tall human raised by North Pole elves, which has become a Christmas-season classic. (It was Santa’s fault, really; the human baby crawled into his giant bag of gifts one busy Christmas Eve.) The Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert called the film “one of those rare Christmas comedies that has a heart, a brain and a wicked sense of humor.”He was a former F.B.I. man in Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “JFK,” he did voice work for several animated series and he starred briefly in several more prime-time series. They included “Off the Rack” (1984), as Eileen Brennan’s business partner; “The Trials of Rosie O’Neill” (1991), with Sharon Gless; “Thunder Alley” (1994), a sitcom in which he played a retired stock car racer; and “Center of the Universe” (2004), as John Goodman’s intrusive father.Mr. Asner continued working late in life, appearing on “The Good Wife” in 2015 with Julianna Margulies.Jeff Neumann/CBS One of his last film appearances was as a New York psychologist in “The Garden Left Behind” (2019), a drama about a young Mexican transgender woman that won a SXSW Film Festival audience award. That year he also appeared on several television series, including five episodes of “Dead to Me,” a Netflix drama about grief.Mr. Asner married Nancy Sykes in 1959, and they had three children. They divorced in 1988. Ten years later he married Cindy Gilmore, a producer; they separated in 2007 but did not divorce until 2015. He is survived by two daughters, Liza and Katie Asner; two sons, Charles and Matthew, and 10 grandchildren.In a 1999 interview, Mr. Asner looked back fondly on his long-running series. “To me, the best performances come from those milieus where you create the family,” he said. “Of bolstering each other, of love for each other’s work, of trying to help each other, of trying to get the best out of each other. And I believe it pays off.”Jack Kadden contributed reporting. More

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      Allan Burns, a Creator of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ Dies at 85

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAllan Burns, a Creator of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ Dies at 85He won Emmys for his work on that show and helped create the spinoffs “Rhoda” and “Lou Grant.” Among his other creations was the cereal mascot Cap’n Crunch.Allan Burns in 2016. He was involved in the creation of TV shows ranging from the acclaimed “Mary Tyler Moore Show” to the much-mocked “My Mother the Car.”Credit…Frederick M. Brown/Getty ImagesFeb. 3, 2021Updated 4:52 p.m. ETAllan Burns, a leading television writer in the 1970s and ’80s who helped create the groundbreaking hit sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and its dramatic spinoff, “Lou Grant,” died on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 85.His son Matthew said the causes were Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia.“Allan’s range was like nobody’s,” James L. Brooks, his partner in creating Ms. Moore’s series, said in a phone interview. “I don’t think you ever get an absurdist, a legitimate humorist and a feeling person in one package.”In 1969, Mr. Burns and Mr. Brooks were working on “Room 222,” a comedy-drama series set in a Los Angeles high school, when Grant Tinker, Ms. Moore’s husband, asked them to create a series for her. Their first concept was that she play a divorced woman who worked as a reporter for a gossip columnist.“We ran it past Mary and Grant and they absolutely loved it,” Mr. Burns said in an interview for the Television Academy in 2004.But Mr. Burns said that during a meeting he and Mr. Brooks attended at CBS headquarters in Manhattan, a research executive told them there were four things American audiences “won’t tolerate”: New Yorkers, Jews, divorced people and men with mustaches.“What do you do with that?” Mr. Burns said in the interview. “We were dismissed.”Mr. Burns and Mr. Brooks quickly turned the series’ setting into a TV newsroom and Ms. Moore’s character, Mary Richards, into a woman who had never been married and had just ended a long-term relationship.Ed Asner and Mary Tyler Moore in the first episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” which Mr. Burns created with James L. Brooks. They later developed the spinoff series “Lou Grant” for Mr. Asner.Credit…CBS, via Getty Images“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” — set largely at WJM-TV in Minneapolis and in Mary Richards’s apartment — was praised for Ms. Moore’s portrayal of a single working woman, and for its writing. The series ran from 1970 to 1977 and won 29 Emmy Awards; Mr. Burns shared in five of them.“Allan could channel the character of Mary Richards,” Mr. Brooks said. “He gave us a sense of her by the way he talked about her.”Mr. Burns and Mr. Brooks twice spun off shows from “Mary Tyler Moore” for MTM Enterprises, Ms. Moore and Mr. Tinker’s production company. “Rhoda” followed the ups and downs of Mary’s best friend after she moved back to New York. In “Lou Grant,” which began in 1977, Mary Richards’s tough-yet-comedic newsroom boss, played by Ed Asner, became the determined city editor of a Los Angeles newspaper.In the late 1970s, Mr. Burns started branching out into films. He wrote the screenplay for “A Little Romance” (1979), starring Laurence Olivier and Diane Lane, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and for “Butch and Sundance: The Early Days” (1979), a prequel to “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969). He also wrote and directed “Just Between Friends” (1986), with Ms. Moore, Ted Danson and Christine Lahti. It was his only film as a director.Mr. Burns directing Christine Lahti in “Just Between Friends” (1986), which he wrote and directed. It was his only film as a director.Credit…Orion, via Everett CollectionAnd he continued to develop sitcoms. In the 1980s, he created or helped create three short-lived comedy series: “The Duck Factory,” which starred Jim Carrey as an animator; “Eisenhower and Lutz” about a shiftless lawyer played by Scott Bakula, and “FM,” set in a public radio station.In his review of “Eisenhower and Lutz,” John O’Connor of The New York Times wrote of Mr. Burns, “He cannot only whip up generous batches of clever dialogue but is also extremely clever with staging bits of comic business.”Allan Pennington Burns was born on May 18, 1935, in Baltimore. His father, Donald, was a lawyer. His mother, Paulene (Dobbling) Burns, was a homemaker who became a secretary after her husband died when Allan was 9. Three years after that, she and Allan moved to Hawaii, where his older brother, Donald Jr., was stationed at Pearl Harbor.While attending Punahou School in Honolulu, Allan contributed cartoons to The Honolulu Star-Advertiser. He used his drawing talent while studying architecture at the University of Oregon. He dropped out during his sophomore year in 1956 and moved to Los Angeles, where he was hired as a page at NBC and later became a story analyst. After being laid off, he began writing and illustrating greeting cards while trying to find work at an animation studio.He found a job at Jay Ward Productions, which produced “Rocky and His Friends,” the satirical cartoon series about the adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (more formally, Rocket J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose). Mr. Burns appeared unannounced at Mr. Ward’s office on Sunset Boulevard, toting his portfolio of greeting cards. Mr. Ward leafed through the cards, chuckled and quickly hired him.Mr. Burns wrote for the moose, the squirrel and other characters on “The Bullwinkle Show.” He also developed the character Cap’n Crunch for Quaker Oats, which had hired Mr. Ward’s company to create a mascot for a new cereal. After he and his colleague Chris Hayward left Mr. Ward in 1963, they created “My Mother the Car,” a sitcom that starred Jerry Van Dyke, with Ann Sothern as the voice of his mother, who has been reincarnated as a vintage Porter automobile and speaks only to him. A notable flop considered by some to be one of TV’s worst shows, it was canceled after one season.In 1967 and 1968, Mr. Burns and Mr. Hayward worked on the only season of the sitcom “He & She,” in which the married couple Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss played a comic book artist and his wife, a social worker. Mr. Burns shared his first Emmy with Mr. Hayward for one episode.After “He & She” was canceled, its producer, Leonard Stern, brought them to the espionage parody, “Get Smart,” another series he produced, then in its fourth season. “Room 222” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” soon followed.In addition to his son Matthew, Mr. Burns is survived by his wife, Joan (Bailey) Burns; another son, Eric; and five grandchildren.Mr. Asner, who worked for Mr. Burns on both “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Lou Grant,” recalled him in an interview as a gentlemanly boss.“He was a guide and mentor, and I loved him,” he said. “Jim Brooks was the bouncing-off-the-walls part of the team, and Allan was the stabilizer.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More