November 15 - Ed Asner

Picture courtesy of wikia.com

On this day, in 1929, Yitzhak Edward Asner was born in Kansas City, Missouri. Ed graduated from Wyandotte High School in Kansas City and moved north for college, attending the University of Chicago. After a short stint working a factory job for General Motors, Ed joined the United States Army Signal Corps. It was during this time that he was bitten by the acting bug and appeared in several plays that toured around the Army camps in Europe entertaining the troops.

Upon leaving the military, Ed briefly joined the Playwrights Theatre Company in Chicago before moving to New York. He would occasionally return to the Windy City to appear with the successor to Playwrights, The Second City. In New York, Ed got roles in such off-Broadway shows as a revival of Threepenny Opera until 1960, when he made his on Broadway debut in Face of a Hero with Jack Lemmon. Hero ran for a total of 36 performances.

Picture grabbed from metv.com

Ed made his television debut in 1957 on CBS in an anthology series called Studio One. Throughout the rest of the Fifties and the Sixties, he would make guest appearances on a variety of shows. Sometimes it was sci-fi like The Invaders or Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Sometimes it was dramas like Route 66 or Mr. Novak. Frequently it was other anthology shows like The Outer Limits and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. 

Ed's days of bouncing from role to role took a break in 1970 when he landed a steady gig as Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. For the next seven years he gave Mary Richards hell for having too much spunk, winning three Emmy Awards for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy. When that show wrapped, Ed did something unprecedented in the history of television. His character received a spin-off titled Lou Grant, not that unusual except that the new show was an hour long drama instead of a half hour comedy. The unprecedented part is that Ed would go on to win two more Emmy Awards, this time for Lead Actor in a Drama. He became the first person to ever win Emmys for both comedy and drama playing the same character (in the forty years since only one other person has managed that feat, Uzo Aduba for Orange Is the New Black). Ed would later win two more Emmys, one for his role in Roots and another for his role in Rich Man, Poor Man making him the most decorated performer in Emmy history with seven total wins.

Picture stolen from fanpop.com

Ed is no stranger to the big screen either. One of his first films was an uncredited role in the 1962 Elvis Presley movie Kid Galahad. Dozens of other roles followed including parts in They Call Me Mr. Tibbs with Sidney Poitier, Fort Apache, The Bronx with Paul Newman and Oliver Stone's JFK. His most enduring film role is probably as Santa Clause in 2003's Christmas Classic Elf.

Ed has done a number of roles for the Walt Disney Company, mostly as voice work for animated characters. For those who remember the series Gargoyles, he was the voice of Hudson for 39 episodes. He voiced Evil Georgie in a 1994 episode of Dinosaurs and various voices for Recess, Hercules, and Buzz Lightyear of Star Command. Ed made live action appearances in the 1976 movie Gus and and an episode of Disneyland. His biggest contribution to the Disney family was as one of my favorite characters of all time, Carl Fredricksen in 2009's Up. I wholeheartedly agree with the critic who felt a new Oscar category should have been created for Vocal Acting just so it could have been given to Ed.

Picture lifted from geeks.media

Outside of acting, Ed has been highly active in politics and charity work. He was a two term president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1981-85. He endorsed Barack Obama for US President and regularly endorses candidates to lesser offices. He serves on the boards of The Survivor Mitzvah Project (providing aid to holocaust survivors in Europe), the conservation group Defenders of Wildlife and a non-profit school for kids with autism, Exceptional Minds (both his son and a grandson are autistic).