Ed Asner (November 15, 1929 - August 29, 2021) was an American actor, voice actor and a former president of the Screen Actors Guild. He is primarily known for his role as Lou Grant during the 1970s and early 1980s, on both The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spin-off series Lou Grant, making him one of the few television actors to portray the same character in both a comedy and a drama.
Asner is a television legend, the winner of seven acting Emmy Awards (which puts him tied with Mary Tyler Moore, both of whom rank second to their The Mary Tyler Moore Show Show co-star, Cloris Leachman who has nine). In all, he was nominated 20 times for an Emmy Award, with 17 nods for a Primetime Emmy and three for a Daytime award. (All of his wins were for Primetime.)
Five of his Emmys were for playing Lou Grant, with three of these awards for The Mary Tyler Moore Show and two for Lou Grant. The other two were for his roles as Axel Jordache, the titular characters' father, in the 1976 miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man and Captain Thomas Davies, the morally conflicted captain of the slave ship Lord Ligonier which brought Kunta Kinte to America, in the 1977 miniseries Roots.
As well as being one of the most outstanding and most respected actors of his generation, equally adept at comedy as he was at drama, Asner also made a name for himself as a trade unionist and a political activist. He served two terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1981 to 1985, during which he criticized former SAG President Ronald Reagan for his Central American policy.
He played Sgt. Siroleo in the original series episode "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork".