Ed Asner

Ed Asner was an American actor born on November 15, 1929, in Kansas City, Missouri, who grew up in Kansas City, Kansas. His parents, Lizzie and Morris David Asner, were Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Ukraine who operated a second-hand shop and junkyard. Asner was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household and given the Hebrew name Yitzhak. He had four older siblings: Ben, Eve, Esther, and Labe. He attended Wyandotte High School in Kansas City, Kansas, and later enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he studied journalism before a professor discouraged him from pursuing the field. He shifted his focus to drama, making his first stage appearance as Thomas Becket in a campus production of T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. After leaving school, he worked as a taxi driver and on a General Motors assembly line before being drafted into the United States Army in 1951.

Asner served with the Army Signal Corps from 1951 to 1953 during the Korean War, during which he performed in plays that toured military bases in Europe. Following his discharge, he helped establish the Playwrights Theatre Company in Chicago before relocating to New York City. His early New York stage work included an Off-Broadway role as Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum in a revival of Threepenny Opera in late 1955. His Broadway career, which spanned from 1955 to 2012, included appearances in Face of a Hero alongside Jack Lemmon in 1960, as well as roles in Born Yesterday, Grace, and Threepenny Opera.

Asner made his television debut in 1957 on Studio One and his film debut in 1962 in the Elvis Presley vehicle Kid Galahad. Throughout the 1960s he accumulated extensive television credits, including guest appearances on The Untouchables, Naked City, Route 66, Gunsmoke, Mission: Impossible, The Fugitive, Ben Casey, and The Outer Limits, among others. He played Detective Sgt. Thomas Siroleo in the 1963 Outer Limits episode "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork" and the ex-premier Brynov in a 1965 episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

Asner became widely recognized for his portrayal of Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which ran from 1970 to 1977. When that series concluded, the character was carried into the dramatic spinoff Lou Grant, which ran from 1977 to 1982. The original series was a thirty-minute comedy centered on television journalism, while the spinoff was an hour-long drama focused on newspaper journalism. Asner won five Emmy Awards for the role alone — three as Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for The Mary Tyler Moore Show and two as Lead Actor in a Drama Series for Lou Grant — making him one of only two actors to win Emmy Awards for the same character in both a comedy and a drama. He also reprised the Lou Grant character in appearances on Rhoda and Roseanne. His total of seven Primetime Emmy Awards is the most won by any male performer. The remaining two came for his performances as Axel Jordache in the miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man in 1976 and as Captain Davies, the morally conflicted captain of the slave ship Lord Ligonier, in the miniseries Roots in 1977.

His film work included El Dorado in 1966, They Call Me Mister Tibbs! in 1970, Fort Apache, The Bronx in 1981, JFK in 1991, and Too Big to Fail in 2011. He voiced the lead character Carl Fredricksen in the Pixar animated film Up in 2009 and appeared as Santa Claus in several films. Later television work included starring roles in the ABC sitcom Thunder Alley from 1994 to 1995 and Michael: Every Day from 2011 to 2017, as well as recurring and guest appearances on The Practice, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, The Good Wife, Cobra Kai, Briarpatch, Working Class, and Dead to Me.

Asner maintained a prolific voice acting career across several decades. He voiced J. Jonah Jameson in Spider-Man: The Animated Series from 1994 to 1998, Hudson in Gargoyles from 1994 to 1997, and Ed Wuncler Sr. in The Boondocks from 2005 to 2014, among numerous other animated roles. He also narrated audiobook recordings, earning one Audie Award and receiving nominations for two Grammy Awards and an additional Audie. Asner died on August 29, 2021.