All All. Sign In. List activity. Edward Asner. Actor Producer Additional Crew Up 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 and , he attended the University of Chicago. The onset of the Korean War saw him drafted into the U. Army Signals Corps and posted to France where he was primarily assigned clerical tasks. In , he appeared off-Broadway in the leading role of the beggar king Jonathan Peachum in Brecht's Threepenny Opera.
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 , The Untouchables , The Fugitive , Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea sinister dictator-in-exile Brynov , The Invaders twice -- as aliens and How the Ghosts Stole Christmas 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 Rich Man, Poor Man and as the slave ship's morally conflicted master, Captain Thomas Davies, in Roots , which earned him a Primetime Emmy Award in That was also the part which made Asner a household name: the gruff, snarky newspaper editor Lou Grant 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.
