R.I.P. Dabney Coleman, legendary jerk of TV and film
Coleman, one of the iconic performers of the 1980s and beyond, starred in everything from 9 To 5 to Yellowstone, Recess, and more
Dabney Coleman has died. A veteran actor of stage and screen, with nearly 200 credits to his name, Coleman’s (frequently scowling, almost always mustachioed) face was a fixture of American film and TV from the 1960s forward. Renowned for his ability to play just the right kind of loathsome jerk—the kind who was frequently funny enough to make his meaner impulses really land—Coleman starred in films like WarGames, 9 To 5, Tootsie, and many more. He was no less an icon of TV, either, with a resumé that ran the gamut from Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman to Yellowstone, with stops along the way for animated fare like Recess, legal dramas like The Guardian, and prestige period pieces like Boardwalk Empire. Per THR, Coleman died on Thursday. He was 92.
Born in Texas, Coleman was drafted in 1953, ultimately serving in the U.S. Army until 1955. Afterward, he moved to New York, where he began training as an actor at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where he was a friend and student of Sydney Pollack, who he’d collaborate with on multiple films. (Although, in an extremely lively and detailed 2012 Random Roles interview with us, Coleman noted that he was pretty sure that his first screen acting was actually as a corpse, in an episode of United States Steel Hour.)
Coleman worked steadily, in TV, film, and on the New York stage, throughout the 1960s and ’70s, but by his own admission, only had a major turning point in 1976, when Norman Lear cast him as slimy mayor Merle Jeeter in satirical soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Coleman called the role, a small-town cynical political monster, “a once-in-a-lifetime character… the best thing I ever did.” He ultimately played Jeeter across three TV shows (including Fernwood Tonight and Forever Fernwood) and hundreds of episodes of TV. Meanwhile, the series proved that Coleman could be a comedy star, in addition to a dramatic actor, and it’s a line he’d spend the rest of his career gleefully waltzing across.