Five Golden Globes and seven Emmys, most of them for playing the gruff, no-nonsense CBS reporter Lou Grant, first on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and then in the dramatic “Lou Grant” spin-off. At 91 years old, one of the deans of American cinema and TV died, Ed Asner, an actor, voice actor and great characteristic, a face that even Italians know well as well as for American films and TV series for having been in 2002 the elderly Angelo Roncalli in a popular miniseries directed by Giorgio Capitani dedicated to Pope John. Viewers of a certain age might remember him for a miniseries that really made history in the late 1970s: Radici, in the role of slaver Captain Daviesper, was 1977 and the year before he had been the patriarch of a German-American family in the “Rich Man, Poor Man” miniseries.
Born in Kansas City on November 15, 1929, at the cinema he was FBI agent Guy Banister in Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “JFK”, Santa Claus in Will Ferrell’s 2003 comedy “Elf” and later in the same year as voice actor the protagonist of the Oscar winner of Pixar ‘Up’ giving the voice to the elderly balloon maker Carl Fredricksen. As a TV star he also has the Walk of Fame in Los Angeles. In the early 1980s he was president of the Screen Actors Guild, the actors’ union, thanks to his charisma and political activism: he led a strike in 1980 that managed to block production for three months and boycott the Emmys of that year: the aim was to obtain higher salaries for the actors in consideration of the passage of the series on pay TV (a battle similar to the solitary and forerunner of Scarlett Johannson).
The thing was not painless: CBS canceled in 1982 the series Lou Grant that he played despite being at the top of the ratings until its fifth and final season. He was an activist until the end: last year he participated in a class action of actors for the health plan of the Sag union during the pandemic. He continued to work forever: recently he was in the cast of Cobra kai, the spin off of Karate Kid, still on the air. (