February 25 - Darren McGavin

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On this day, in 2006, William Lyle Richardson passed away in Los Angeles, California from cardiovascular disease. Known professionally as Darren McGavin, he was born on May 7, 1922 in Spokane, Washington. When his parents divorced at the ripe old age of 11, Darren's father gained custody of him in spite of the fact he was a traveling salesman. As a result, Darren was boarded with a family on a farm near Tacoma, a circumstance he hated. He ran away to live with some Native Americans, until his father eventually caught up with him and sent him to boarding school. When he was 16, Darren ran away from the boarding school and temporarily lived under the docks in San Francisco on his way to his mother's ranch in Southern California. After finally graduating from high school, he enrolled at the University of the Pacific as an architecture student. But alas, the dream to design buildings didn't last very long.

To subsidize his collegiate pursuits, Darren took a job building sets for a local theater group. He liked it so much (or decided he didn't like architecture as much as he thought) that he dropped out of college and became a painter at Columbia Pictures. In 1945, he had the opportunity to audition for a bit part in A Song to Remember, a Frederic Chopin biopic, and he managed to get cast as an uncredited Student. He never looked back. He moved to New York City, took classes under Sanford Meisner at the Actors Studio and was playing Happy Lohman in a national touring production of Death of a Salesman by 1949.

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The Fifties saw Darren expanding his career on several fronts. In New York, he began appearing on Broadway stages, originating the title role in The Rainmaker in 1954. In Hollywood, he starred in 1955's Summertime with Katherine Hepburn and The Man with the Golden Arm with Frank Sinatra. On television, he was cast regularly in live productions like Kraft Television Hour and taped shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Starting in 1957, Darren spent two seasons as the lead on Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer and immediately followed it with two seasons on the western Riverboat playing opposite Burt Reynolds (the two famously, and publicly, did not get along).

The remainder of the Sixties kept Darren busy with various projects. He returned to Broadway twice, first as the King part of The King and I, then in a revival of the George S. Kaufman comedy Dinner at Eight. He starred in a couple of Westerns with the likes of Joseph Cotton and Audie Murphy. And he, of course, made the rounds of most of the major television series of the decade, doing guest spots on everything from Gunsmoke to The Man from U.N.C.L.E to being a semi-regular on The Name of the Game.

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Darren took his place in Disneyana for the first time in 1968 playing various roles on the anthology show Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. He played an expert safecracker (who nonetheless never manages to actually steal anything) named Duke in the 1976 comedy No Deposit, No Return with Don Knotts and David Niven. He paired with Knotts again two years later for Hot Lead and Cold Feet as Mayor Ragsdale. He returned to Disney's anthology show when it returned in 1979 as Disney's Wonderful World, appearing in a episode called Donovan's World. And in 1995, he gave voice to Dominic Dracon on an episode of Gargoyles.

Image copyright MGM

Darren's most famous role (and one you can see multiple times a week from Thanksgiving to New Year's) came in 1983 when he brilliantly portrayed the Old Man in the cult classic A Christmas Story. Furnaces, the neighbors dogs and the word 'fragile' will never be quite the same once you've experienced the delight of the Parker family and its foul mouthed patriarch.

It wasn't until near the end of his career that Darren began receiving tangible recognition from his peers. For his portrayal of Murphy Brown's father on the hit television series of the same name, he received a Prime Time Emmy nomination in 1990. A year later, he won a CableACE Award for his part in The General Motors Playwrights Theater premiere episode "Clara." His final performances in the late nineties included Adam Sandler's father in Billy Madison and two episodes of The X-Files. After a career spanning almost six decades, Darren took his final bow in a Los Angeles hospital in 2006. He was 83.

November 15 - Ed Asner

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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.

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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).