The curtain has fallen on spunky, outspoken Ed Asner

Ed Asner, the star of television series Lou Grant and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, who moonlighted as a political activist against US president Ronald Reagan’s policy on Central America, has died. He was 91.

“We are sorry to say that our beloved patriarch passed away this morning peacefully,” a tweet from Asner’s official Twitter account said on Sunday. “Words cannot express the sadness we feel. With a kiss on your head — Goodnight dad. We love you.” A cause of death was not given.

Asner continued to appear in TV shows such as The Good Wife and Bones, even in the last years of his life. In 2019, he played a retiree who gave life advice in the Netflix show Dead to Me, which starred Christina Applegate. A new generation of moviegoers was introduced to Asner as the voice of curmudgeon Carl Fredricksen in the 2009 Pixar-Disney animated hit Up.

Asner won more Emmy awards, seven in total, than any other man, mainly for his supporting role on the comedy series The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77) and the lead as a newspaper editor in the drama Lou Grant (1977-82). He was also the only person to win Emmys for playing the same character — Lou Grant was a spin-off from The Mary Tyler Moore Show — in a comedy and a drama. He won the Screen Actors Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.

After Asner delivered the line “I hate spunk!” on the first Mary Tyler Moore Show, in which he portrayed the heavy-drinking boss of an aspiring TV news producer, the character of Grant began to take on a life of its own. In 1977 CBS commissioned a one-hour drama that followed Grant as the editor of the fictional Los Angeles Tribune, tackling social and ethical issues such as child abuse, nuclear weapons and conflicts of interest. The Lou Grant show won 13 Emmy awards.

Asner’s public support for providing medical aid to rebels fighting the US-backed regime in El Salvador in the early 1980s led to the show’s demise. Sponsors Kimberly-Clark, Vidal Sassoon and Cadbury withdrew their advertisements from the programme and Lou Grant was cancelled two weeks later. The actor, who travelled with bodyguards after receiving death threats over the issue, attributed the network’s decision to chairperson William Paley’s close relationship to Reagan.

Most insiders seem to think that the show would not have been cancelled had it not been for the controversy that arose over my stand on El Salvador. I thought at the time that I’d never work again.

—  Actor Ed Asner

“Most insiders seem to think that the show would not have been cancelled had it not been for the controversy that arose over my stand on El Salvador,” Asner said in an interview with the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation. “I thought at the time that I’d never work again.”

A member of the Democratic Socialist Organising Committee, Asner also picketed with 11,000 striking air traffic control workers in 1981 in their dispute with the Reagan administration over more pay and a reduced 32-hour working week. He was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild in the same year and served in that role until 1985. The guild had been a springboard for Reagan, who was SAG president for seven terms, in his future political career as California governor and US president.

Asked in a 2010 interview with Progressive magazine what he thought about socialism, Asner said: “I think we need more of it.”

Edward David Asner was born on November 15 1929 in Kansas City, the youngest of five children to Russian Orthodox Jewish parents. His father, Morris David Asner, ran a junkyard and his mother, Lizzie Seliger, was a homemaker. He had two brothers and two sisters.

Asner attended Wyandotte High School in Kansas City and graduated in 1947. He enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he acted in plays, but dropped out after 18 months. He drove taxis, was a delivery man and worked in the steel mills in Gary, Indiana, as well as on the assembly line of a car plant. He served in the US Army Signal Corps from 1951 to 1953, appearing in plays during tours in Europe.

After military service Asner joined the Playwrights Theatre Company in Chicago before moving to New York, where he worked on Broadway. He had parts in television dramas, before taking on the character of Lou Grant.

Asner’s other Emmy awards were for his role as Axel Jordache, a harsh father in a dysfunctional family in the miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man (1976), and as a ship’s captain transporting enslaved Africans in the miniseries Roots (1977). He was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in 2003.

Asner was married twice. He had three children with Nancy Sikes, a stepson with Cindy Gilmore and a son with girlfriend Carol Vogelman.

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