Being Ed or it is Lou?

Ed’s claim to television fame was as Lou Grant in Mary Tyler Moore Show, as the obnoxious and hard-nosed yet lovable tyrant who ran the WJM-TV’s Six O’clock Newsroom in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The clip below, the first episode of the iconic show, that ran on CBS, aka then the Tiffany Network, from 1970 to 1977, got Ed the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences nomination for an Emmy for best supporting actor in a comedy series every year for the next seven. He won in 1971, 1972 and 1975.

When CBS canceled the show, he continued playing the archetypal tough but warm-hearted boss in the eponymous spinoff “Lou Grant.” Here he won another two Emmies as best lead actor, making him the first performer to have received Emmys for playing the same character in both a comedy and a drama series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zj286uBKCu0

Missouri to Kansas to France

Ed was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the youngest of five children to an Orthodox Jewish family who named him originally Yitzhak, but his family moved across the river & he went to school across the river in Kansas City, Kansas.. His parents registered him as Edward David Asner at school.

In high school, Ed got interested in dramatics and worked on a school radio program. He worked as taxi driver, encyclopedia salesman, metal finisher at an auto plant and his acting career. That got interrupted by the US Draft then in effect , and they sent him to France. When he got out, with the GI Bill he went to Chicago and enrolled in a real acting program where he discovered his talent for being a “straight man” in comedy and the Playwrights Theatre Club, founded by luminaries Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and the Compass Players, an improvisational cabaret revue that later formed the Second City Theater in 1959, gave him a start.

How this all come together

Pluto near his Ascendant of 16 Cancer 14 shows his charisma and magnetism and as they are intercepted, he was good at hiding his own personality (trine the Sun in the fifth house at 23 Scorpioio 15 right next to the sixth house of work) when it suited him.  The Sun is opposite his moon making hiss Line of Vitality.

                        Ed as Sag President

Ed Asner died Sunday, August 29, 2021, the same day as Swedish film star Ingrid Bergman.  His family confirmed his death via Twitter.