A look at Ed Asner's resume turns up guest roles in a host of legendary television shows: "The Naked City," "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "Route 66," "The Untouchables," "The Outer Limits," "Burke's Law," "Mission: Impossible," "The Wild Wild West," "Rich Man, Poor Man," "Roots."
His best-known role was Lou Grant -- first in "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" (1970-77) as a TV news director, then in "Lou Grant" (1977-82) as a newspaper editor.
Along with a steady paycheck for 12 years, the role earned him multiple honors, among them Golden Globe and Emmy awards. So far, he's the only actor to win an Emmy for playing the same character in a sitcom and a drama.
With such a list of accomplishments, Asner, it could be argued, is one of our greatest actors. So who better to play a man whom he considers one of the greatest presidents: Franklin Delano Roosevelt?
Asner, who turns 80 in November, is touring in a one-man show about Roosevelt, a role for which he has great sympathy, he said in a telephone interview from his Los Angeles office.
"The works done to save us from the Depression were phenomenal; he saved us from either sinking into communism or fascism if the remedies had not been applied," Asner said.
"I think what people don't realize is the enormous pro-German feeling that existed in this country at the time, and a capability by a large part of our population to think in terms of fascist rule. One of the quotes in my play deals with Father Coughlin, an agitator of the time. I had never heard this quote, but at a Nazi rally he stated, 'When we get through with the Jews in this country, they'll think their treatment in Germany was nothing.' "
"FDR" begins in 1924, roughly where Dore Schary's well-known play and film, "Sunrise at Campobello," ends, Asner said. It talks about Roosevelt's fight against the polio that struck him in 1921 and his determination to continue his political career with the help of his wife, Eleanor, and his close friend and political adviser, Louis Howe.
The show then moves into the creative ways, including the Lend-Lease Act and the lifting of an arms embargo, that Roosevelt found to help the British, who were fighting the Germans for several years before the United States entered the war. It also touches briefly on his personal life, including his strained relationship with Eleanor and his romance with Lucy Mercer, who most modern historians believe was his longtime mistress.
In the years between "Lou Grant" and "FDR," Asner hasn't slowed down much.
He is often featured in Hallmark Channel movies, some of which he considers among his finest work, pretty heady praise from a man who has earned seven performance Emmys, including one for the morally conflicted slave-ship captain in "Roots." And most recently, he can be found floating over the skies of South America. Or at least a representation of him can.
Asner provides the voice of Carl Fredricksen, the 79-year-old curmudgeon who is the main character in Pixar's "Up." In the animated film, Carl shuffles through life after his beloved wife, Ellie, dies. But when he is reminded of her sense of adventure, he decides to pay tribute to it, and with the help of thousands of balloons tied to the roof of his house, he floats off to South America, a place she always wanted to visit.
It's a role he loves.
"I'm proud of the job I did, and I'm proud of the job they exacted from me. But the credit has to go to (co-directors and writers) Pete Docter and Bob Peterson. I had a wonderful time."
He also thinks kindly of his days in the newspaper drama "Lou Grant," although the cancellation of the drama in 1982 still grates.
CBS at the time maintained that the show did not have enough viewers to merit its renewal, but "Lou Grant" often made Nielsen's Top 20. Asner and many television historians believe that CBS was tired of dealing with their star's controversial political views and decided to dump him.
The issues were the important part of "Lou Grant," and since his character was stuck behind a desk, the role wasn't challenging, he said.
"The paper was the star, the reporters were the primary stars, and I figured in there, so it was a job, but it was a job that had a holy mission. Acting-wise, it was not exciting for me at all.
"This often happens with, I would say, the hub of a show, the nexus of the show. You get the guests and the supporting cast spinning around like a solar system and they attract the glimmer and the light, and the hub has to remain fixed. I mean, look at 'The Untouchables'; it's all the criminals and all the guests who provided the sturm und drang. Even 'Seinfeld.' Jerry was very, very good, but it's all the unbelievable loonies who surrounded him and provoked him. That was my situation as Lou Grant."
Getting back to "FDR," Asner said that he had no input on the play, but from what he's read, he finds the incidents, even those without historical evidence, believable.
That train of thought led him to reflect on the tough task that future historians will have when trying to reconstruct a past based on e-mails and tweets instead of journals and other writings.
"I'm a gloomy Gus. I'm a glass half empty, I guess. When you look at the Ken Burns special on the Civil War, you're fascinated by the letters these people wrote home, letters of great literary, emotional and thoughtful content, I don't think you could get a letter like that written home now from the front no matter how hard you tried."
(Contact Nanciann Cherry at ncherry(at)theblade.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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