Ed Asner, the legendary TV icon, philanthropist, activist peacefully left his family and fans in grief on Sunday morning at 91 years of age.
His family moaned on Twitter saying:
Charles Sherman, a Publicist reported that Ed Asner died a natural death in Tarzana, Los Angeles in his hometown.
Survivors include Katie, Charles, his children, twins Liza and Matthew, and grandchildren Avivah, Will, Jake, Charlotte, Gabriel, Eddy, Wolf, Max, Helena, and Grant. His Wife Nancy Lou Sykes and Cindy whom he married in 1959 and 1998 respectively.
Former Screen Actors Guild president, who was mainly known for his character as Lou Grant in its spinoff Lou Grant and The Mary Tyler Moore Show reached heights of fame because of his unmatched role of the same character in both a drama and a comedy series.
With seven wins in the history of Emmy awards, he’s the most deserving as he was a gifted actor with immense potential. He got five awards for playing the grumpy yet loving newsperson, Grant. In 2001, he also received the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award.
The list of his credits doesn’t stop at Emmys. He was the voice behind Carl Frederickson’s Oscar-winning hit, Up. On the wall of his awards, there’s another name Elf, in which he acted as Santa Clause. He was recently nominated in several Netflix nominated comedy movies at Emmys like Grace and Frankie, Cobra Kai (in which he acted as Sid Weinberg, stepfather of Johnny Lawrence), and Dead to Me.
Asner was born in Kansas City on November 15, 1929. Asner began his acting career through theatre and helped the Chicago theater company Playwrights; an ancestor of The Second Company. He played his career’s first role beside Jack Lemon in the 1960 production Face of the Hero and landed to act on TV series as a debut from Studio one in 1957.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show is one of the strings of his guest-starring half-hour comedy role in 1970. When the series went off in 1977, Asner’s character Grant started his own series, Lou Grant, an hour-long drama (1977-82). Moreover, the versatile character played Grant twice in two other TV shows, Roseanne and Rhoda.
Asner was one of two actors (the other one is Uzo Aduba) who won Emmy for drama and comedy on different shows for the same role. His most recent played character was Franklin D. Roosevelt which he played on stage as a one-man show. He was especially known for his voice work and appearances, which include The Practice, The Closer, The Good Wife and Grace and Frankie, and Studio 60 on the sunset trip.
In 2016, Asner took on the character in Jeff Cohen’s series The Soap Myth as a Milton Saltzman, a survivor of the Holocaust at Bruno Walter Theatre New York. The dexterous actor performed for the theater for three years across the cities in the United States, when the tour had to be canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.
