Edward Asner

actor, producer, additional crew

Edward Asner was born on Nov 15, 1929 in USA. Edward Asner's big-screen debut came with Route 66 - Season 1 directed by David Lowell Rich in 1960, strarring Custody Officer Lincoln Peers / Carl Selman / Lt. Tegeler / .... Edward Asner is known for Dug Days directed by Bob Peterson, Bob Peterson stars as Dug and Edward Asner as Carl. Edward Asner has got 41 awards and 27 nominations so far. The most recent award Edward Asner achieved is Faith in Film - Film Festival. The upcoming new movie Edward Asner plays is Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules which will be released on Dec 02, 2022.

Edward Asner was born of Russian Jewish parentage in Kansas City, to Morris David Asner (founder and owner of the Kansas City-based Asner Iron & Metal Company) and his wife Elizabeth "Lizzie" (Seliger). After attending college, Ed worked various jobs, including in a steel mill, as a door-to-door salesman and on an assembly line for General Motors. Between 1947 and 1949, he attended the University of Chicago. The onset of the Korean War saw him drafted into the U.S. Army Signals Corps and posted to France where he was primarily assigned clerical tasks. Upon demobilization, Asner joined the Playwrights Theatre Company in Chicago but soon progressed to New York. In 1955, he appeared off-Broadway in the leading role of the beggar king Jonathan Peachum in Brecht's Threepenny Opera. Five years later, he made his debut on the Great White Way in the courtroom drama Face of a Hero, co-starring alongside Jack Lemmon. He also began regular TV work in anthology drama.From the early '60s, Asner, now based in California, earned his living as a busy supporting actor. His many noted guest appearances included turns in Route 66 (1960), Les incorruptibles (1959), Le fugitif (1963), Voyage au fond des mers (1964) (sinister dictator-in-exile Brynov), Les envahisseurs (1967) (twice -- as aliens) and X Files: aux frontières du réel: How the Ghosts Stole Christmas (1998) (one of a couple of ghostly residents in a haunted mansion). Heavy-set and distinctively gravelly-voiced, Asner established his reputation as tough, robust and uncompromising (though, on occasion, good-hearted) authority figures. Excellent at conveying menace, he was memorably cast as the brutish patriarch Axel Jordache in Le riche et le pauvre (1976) and as the slave ship's morally conflicted master, Captain Thomas Davies, in Racines (1977), which earned him a Primetime Emmy Award in 1977. The immensely prolific Asner (417 IMDB screen credits!) would receive seven Emmys in total (from 21 nominations), all Primetime, and become the only actor to win in both the comedy and drama category for the same role. That was also the part which made Asner a household name: the gruff, snarky newspaper editor Lou Grant (1977). Grant began as a mainstay on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970), a 30-minute sitcom.When the character was promoted to West Coast editor of The Los Angeles Tribune, Asner went on to star in his own much acclaimed drama series. Despite consistently high ratings, the show was axed after five seasons amid rumours of disharmony between the star and producers, possibly due to the former's outspoken political views. Indeed, Asner has been a controversial figure as an activist and campaigner, engaged in a variety of humanitarian and political issues. A self-proclaimed liberal Democrat, he published a book in 2017, amusingly titled "The Grouchy Historian: An Old-Time Lefty Defends Our Constitution Against Right-Wing Hypocrites and Nutjobs."Between 1981 and 1985, Asner served twice as President of the Screen Actors Guild, during which time he was critical of former SAG President Ronald Reagan -- then the president of a greater concern -- for his Central American policy. In 1996, he was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame and in 2002 received the Screen Actors Guild's Life Achievement Award. In addition to appearing on screen and stage, he performed extensive work for radio, video games and animated TV series. He voiced the lead character Carl Fredricksen in Pixar's Oscar-winning production of Là-haut (2009), starred as Santa in Elfe (2003), and played Nicholas Drago in The Games Maker (2014). Ed passed away in Los Angeles at the age of 91 on August 29, 2021.