‘Lou Grant’ and ‘Up’ Star Ed Asner dies at 91

As a child, Mr. Asner became interested in drama and worked on a school radio show. After high school, he was accepted to the University of Chicago, but dropped out after a year and a half to work in odd jobs like taxi driver, encyclopedia salesman, metalworker in an auto factory while trying to build an acting career.

In 1951 he was drafted into the army and sent to France. He regrouped in 1953 and returned to Chicago to work with the Playwrights Theater Club and the Compass Players, the pioneer of the Second City comedy group. He soon moved to New York, however, where he found work on the stage (a small part of “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 a handful of television shows.

When he moved to California in 1961, he found acting jobs more lucrative and starred in “Slattery’s People,” a short-lived CBS political drama starring Richard Crenna. In a speech she attended Vanderbilt University in 2002, she took care to avoid comedy for the most part, out of fear and because “you were discovered by guest starring on drama shows in those days.” But she agreed to audition for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” because, as she said in an Archives of American Television interview, Lou Grant was “the best character I was asked to do” on television or film.

Lou was a heavy-drinking, honest, irritable journalist with sensitive feelings but not planning to show them; a strong air of professional and personal integrity; a fear of being outdated; and, as Mr. Asner told Robert S. Alley and Irby B. Brown, authors of Love Is All Around: The Making of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’, a “great core of shared honor.”

In the post-Lou Grant era, Mr. Asner has worked on both the screen and the stage. He returned to Broadway in 1989 and played the vicious Harry Brock opposite Madeline Kahn in the remake of “Born Yesterday.” The last Broadway play”grace” (2012), a story of gospel-themed motels and murder starring an exterminator.

He gave the voice of the lead character in the Oscar-winning animated film.Above” (2009) is about an elderly widow who flies to South America by tying roughly a zillion colored balloons to her home. Review by Manohla Dargis The New York Times described it as “the purest filmmaking”, praising Mr Asner and the supporting characters – including a burly runaway tracker and several talking dogs.