Ed Asner RIP
Posted: Sun Aug 29, 2021 2:29 pm
Ed Asner has died at 91. According to his birth records, he was born November 15, 1929, 6:00 AM CST, in Kansas City, MO. Her died today at home in Tarzana, CA.
Living around Hollywood, I met him several times in passing. For example, he first introduced me to Dennis Kucinich at a small gathering near my house when he was boosting Dennis for U.S. president. We'd overlap at other events here and there. The last time I saw him was (guessing) four years ago at a friend's show, and I thought he wasn't looking so good - a little trouble concentrating, not the keenly-present person I'd encountered in the past, a little disoriented. (Then, soon after, I saw him in some new performance where he was sharp as a sword.)
Knowing that he was, indeed, a skilled actor, I was always newly surprised that in person he was a lot like his best known characters, having one of the widest smiles I'd ever seen, seamlessly interwoven with acting like a grouch.
His work has enchanted so many of us for so long, well beyond the Mary Tyler Moore show and its spinoff. As a measure of the work we''ll never see, IMDB shows him announced for four movies and a TV show he'll now never be in. Six others (four movies, two TV shows) are in pre-production, so he surely was never filmed for them. One movie is currently filming, five are in post, two are completed and unreleased.
Digging back a little, I see that, as a child, I probably first saw him on something like Naked City and surely on his many episodes (always as a different character) of Route 66 and The Untouchables. He did a little bit of everything in the early '60s, from Ben Casey to Dr. Kildaire, from The Outer Limits to Gene Roddenberry's early show The Lieutenant, from The Defenders to Burke's Law and Judd for the Defense, from The Virginian to Gunsmoke (and lots more). So I'd probably already watched him 40 or 50 times before The Mary Tyler Moore Show appeared. (I wasn't watching TV during the era of Lou Grant.) I enjoyed him repeatedly on Sharon Gless' post C&L show, The Trials of Rosie O'Neill. And he just kept going, one successful series (and a few predictably less successful) after another, and then as a walk-on character of one series after another where he would own the show in the briefest of appearances. (Example: The regrettably short run of Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip.) Probably the last thing I saw him on was Cobra Kai.
So yeah, I loved the guy, any performance he turned in. These were always enhanced by knowing him in person just a bit. That won't be happening anymore. I'll need to settle for occasionally revisiting one of the MORE THAN 400 ROLES he left behind.
Bon voyage, Mr. Asner.
Living around Hollywood, I met him several times in passing. For example, he first introduced me to Dennis Kucinich at a small gathering near my house when he was boosting Dennis for U.S. president. We'd overlap at other events here and there. The last time I saw him was (guessing) four years ago at a friend's show, and I thought he wasn't looking so good - a little trouble concentrating, not the keenly-present person I'd encountered in the past, a little disoriented. (Then, soon after, I saw him in some new performance where he was sharp as a sword.)
Knowing that he was, indeed, a skilled actor, I was always newly surprised that in person he was a lot like his best known characters, having one of the widest smiles I'd ever seen, seamlessly interwoven with acting like a grouch.
His work has enchanted so many of us for so long, well beyond the Mary Tyler Moore show and its spinoff. As a measure of the work we''ll never see, IMDB shows him announced for four movies and a TV show he'll now never be in. Six others (four movies, two TV shows) are in pre-production, so he surely was never filmed for them. One movie is currently filming, five are in post, two are completed and unreleased.
Digging back a little, I see that, as a child, I probably first saw him on something like Naked City and surely on his many episodes (always as a different character) of Route 66 and The Untouchables. He did a little bit of everything in the early '60s, from Ben Casey to Dr. Kildaire, from The Outer Limits to Gene Roddenberry's early show The Lieutenant, from The Defenders to Burke's Law and Judd for the Defense, from The Virginian to Gunsmoke (and lots more). So I'd probably already watched him 40 or 50 times before The Mary Tyler Moore Show appeared. (I wasn't watching TV during the era of Lou Grant.) I enjoyed him repeatedly on Sharon Gless' post C&L show, The Trials of Rosie O'Neill. And he just kept going, one successful series (and a few predictably less successful) after another, and then as a walk-on character of one series after another where he would own the show in the briefest of appearances. (Example: The regrettably short run of Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip.) Probably the last thing I saw him on was Cobra Kai.
So yeah, I loved the guy, any performance he turned in. These were always enhanced by knowing him in person just a bit. That won't be happening anymore. I'll need to settle for occasionally revisiting one of the MORE THAN 400 ROLES he left behind.
Bon voyage, Mr. Asner.