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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.
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.
Mr. Asner married Nancy Sykes in 1959, and they had three children. They divorced in 1988. Ten years later, he married Cindy Gilmore, a producer; they separated in 2007 but did not divorce until 2015. Two daughters, Liza and Kate Asner survive him; two sons, Charles and Matthew, and 10 grandchildren. His ex-son-in-law is Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s nephew, California Governor Gavin Newsom.
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.
His ascendant is rather amusing and gets the Sabian symbol of “a futuristic editorial office provides unknowing symbolism for the table, manuscript, door and staff are all square.” That square in his chart becomes a Grand Trine of Midheaven in Pisces, to Pluto to Mars — a powerful group dynamic that propels him to be in the spotlight espousing his divisive political views.
What is so interesting about the ascendant, Moon-Sun opposite is how that Moon cloaked everything so well, that at 40 (Uranus near the midheaven halved) he got the Lou Grant job and it wasn’t until he was established he let his extreme left-wing views unleashed.. Another t.v. icon that did this was Carroll O’Conner with Archie Bunker in “All in the Family”, that ran from 1971 to 1979 also on the TIffany Network, CBS. Between the Hays Code and McCarthy’s Hollywood Communist Trials, neither man was taking chances.
Ed was a locomotive temperament type.His focal determinator is Saturn at 28 Sagittarius 28, a perspiring fat boy is mowing the grass highlighting his desire that his country be fit and not imperialistically overextended and fat. Interesting that while he hated Donald Trump, they both agreed on this point. As the saying goes, Politics makes strange bedfellows.
Ed as Sag President
Ed was president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1981 to 1985 and was active in political causes both within and beyond the entertainment industry. He supported over the years included unionism the air traffic controllers’ strike of 1981, nationalizing the oil industry, President Biden has practically said the same). He supports animal rights, not only animal testing but the wearing of fur, now almost gone from the culture, and the raising of beef, PETA agrees. Militarily, he protested against the American military presence in El Salvador and supported the Communist Sandinistas. (Uranus trine Mars).
F inale
Ed Asner died Sunday, August 29, 2021, the same day as Swedish film star Ingrid Bergman. His family confirmed his death via Twitter.