Ed Asner.

• Author: Rampell, Ed
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

Ed Asner is back. If you watched the Academy Awards, you saw his face beaming as Up won an Oscar for best animated feature film. Asner had the lead voice role in the movie, which was also a contender for best picture.

Asner's television credits stretch back to the 1950s and 1960s, with appearances on such shows as Studio One, Naked City, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Route 66, Dr. Kildare, Ben Casey , and The Fugitive . Asner attained stardom in the 1970s as the gruff but lovable Minneapolis TV newsroom producer Lou Grant on the long-running Mary Tyler Moore Show . After the beloved sitcom went off the air, Asner played the title role in Lou Grant, editor of a fictional Los Angeles newspaper. In one of the boob tube's most infamous episodes of censorship, CBS canceled the hour-long drama in 1982, reportedly due to Asner's activism on Central America.

Asner's film career includes roles opposite Sidney Poitier in They Call Me Mister Tibbs! , with Paul Newman in Fort Apache, the Bronx , in Oliver Stone's JFK , and as Santa in Elf .

More recently, Asner has appeared on ER and HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm . The winner of seven Emmys and five Golden Globes, Asner was inducted into the TV Academy Hall of Fame in 1996.

Eighty-year-old Asher is now going on the road nationwide in the play FDR , about President Roosevelt during the New Deal and World War II. (For details on the play's schedule, contact win@windwoodtheatricals.com.)

The role is very close to the heart of Asher, an activist actor often at the front lines, lending his celebrity to anti-war and other causes--sometimes at great cost to himself. Asner's outspoken commitment has also won him accolades, including the Anne Frank Human Rights Award, Eugene Debs Award, ACLU's Worker's Rights Committee Award, and the National Emergency Civil Liberties Award.

Shortly before Asner attended the Academy Awards ceremony, The Progressive interviewed him in the book-lined study of his modest house in a middle class residential neighborhood of L.A., as his Snowshoe Siamese cat Wheezy, whom Asher calls "my personal secretary," blithely walked across the star's desk.

Q: How did it feel to play the lead in Up , which was so well received?

Ed Asner: I'm tremendously delighted. I think Up is a marvelous film. It treats subjects that nonanimated pictures should be dealing with more. I hope realistic films will approach the subjects: old age, loneliness, discovering new life, new directions.

Q: How did you get...