Dabney Coleman, the actor beloved by audiences, is dead at 92

Dabney Coleman, an award-winning television and film actor best known for his over-the-top portrayals of garrulous, egotistical characters, died Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, California. He was 92 years old.

His daughter Quincy Coleman confirmed the death in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter on Friday. No reason was given.

Mr. Coleman was equally gifted in comedy and drama, but he received his greatest recognition for his comedic work – notably in the 1980 film “9 to 5,” in which he played a thoroughly despicable boss, and on the NBC sitcom “9 to 5” from 1983-84. Buffalo Bill,” in which he appeared as an unscrupulous TV talk show host in Buffalo.

At a time when antiheroic leads, with the outsized exception of Carroll O’Connor’s “Archie Bunker,” were a rarity in television comedies, Mr. Coleman’s decidedly unlikeable Bill Bittinger in “Buffalo Bill” was an exception. A profile of Mr. Coleman in Rolling Stone called Bill “a rapist of our time, a playfully evil combination of G. Gordon Liddy and Groucho Marx.” (“He must be doing something terrible,” Bill’s network manager said of him in an episode. “It’s in his blood.”)

Mr. Coleman’s manically acerbic performance was widely praised and earned him Emmy nominations for best actor in a comedy in 1983 and 1984. In his review of “Buffalo Bill” in The New York Times, John J. O’Connor said that Mr. Coleman “brings a range of unexpected colors to his performance” and called him “the kind of gifted actor who always seems to be on the verge of becoming a star.” But ratings were disappointing and “Buffalo Bill” only ran 26 episodes.

Mr. Coleman revisited the formula in 1987 with the ABC sitcom “The ‘Slap’ Maxwell Story,” in which he played a similar character, this time an outspoken sportswriter for a troubled newspaper. He received another Emmy nomination and won a Golden Globe for his performance. But low ratings, this time coupled with tensions between Mr. Coleman and producer Jay Tarses (who co-created “Buffalo Bill” with Tom Patchett), led to its end after just one season.

Mr. Coleman starred in two other sitcoms in iterations of what had become his trademark, although with frustratingly little success: the 1991-92 Fox series “Drexell’s Class,” in which he was a corporate raider convicted of tax evasion, Who Takes That Offer to do community service in elementary school in lieu of a prison sentence? and the 1994 NBC series “Madman of the People,” in which he, as an old-school magazine columnist, clashed with his editor, who happened to be his daughter.

That show had an enviable time slot – it followed TV’s hottest show, “Seinfeld,” on the network’s Thursday night schedule – but it, too, was short-lived and was canceled after 16 episodes.

Although Mr. Coleman doesn’t necessarily explain why all of these shows failed, in a 1994 interview with the Times he pointed out what he saw as a perennial problem with his sitcom projects. “Authors sometimes misspell for me,” he said. “They usually try to be funny. I’m trying to make a joke. And that’s not what I do, you know. They’re not jokes; they are not words. It’s acting. It is strange.”

Dabney Wharton Coleman was born on January 3, 1932 in Austin, Texas to Melvin and Mary Coleman. He was raised in Corpus Christi by his mother after his father died of pneumonia when Dabney was 4 years old.

From 1949 to 1951 he attended the Virginia Military Institute and then transferred to the University of Texas, Austin, where he studied business administration. He was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1953 and served two years in Germany in the Special Services Division.

In 1958 he decided to pursue a career as an actor. He went to New York to study at Sanford Meisner’s Neighborhood Playhouse.

In 1961, a year after graduating, he appeared on Broadway in the spy drama “A Call on Kuprin.” Although the screenplay was by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, whose credits included “Auntie Mame” and “Inherit the Wind,” and directed by Broadway veteran George Abbott, it only lasted twelve performances. It would be Mr. Coleman’s only Broadway appearance.

But Hollywood beckoned.

In 1962, Mr. Coleman moved to California, where he began his television career with journeyman work on shows such as “Armstrong Circle Theater” and “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.” His first film from 1965 was also Sydney Pollack’s first as a director: “The Slender Thread”, a suspense drama starring Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft.

For a decade thereafter, he remained a busy if relatively anonymous character actor, appearing in numerous television comedies and dramas as well as small roles in major films such as The Towering Inferno (1974). Then, in 1976, he landed the role that would set the tone for much of his career: Merle Jeeter, the conniving stage father of a child evangelist (and later mayor of the fictional town of Fernwood), in Norman Lear’s satirical soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.”

Mr. Coleman later said of the series: “It had a very strange, offbeat kind of humor, and the key to that was playing it straight.” It was, he added, “the place where I came to that kind came from character.”

It was also around this time, he said, that his jet-black mustache became an essential accessory for his entourage of shady characters. “Everything changed” when he grew his mustache, he later said. “I looked like Richard Nixon without it.”

If he was on the verge of being labeled an unrepentant lout, he made the most of it. “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” was critically acclaimed but was never a real hit (as was its sequel, “Forever Fernwood,” in which Mr. Coleman reprized his role). But Colin Higgins’ 1980 ensemble comedy “9 to 5” was a box office hit and Mr. Coleman’s career breakthrough.

His character, the boss of the office workers played by Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, was – as said more than once in the film, including by Mr. Coleman himself in a fantasy sequence – a “sexist, egotistical liar.” , hypocritical bigot.” Vincent Canby reviewed “9 to 5” in the Times and wrote that Mr. Coleman, playing a “crazy villain,” gave “the funniest performance in the film.”

Mr. Coleman continued to play characters that audiences loved to hate, particularly the misogynistic soap opera director in “Tootsie” (1982). But he also gave more nuanced portrayals, for example as a judge in “Melvin and Howard” (1980), as the love interest of Ms. Fonda’s character in “On Golden Pond” (1981) and as a harried computer scientist in “WarGames” (1983). And while he remained best known for his comedies, he won his only Emmy (he was nominated six times) for a dramatic role as a down-and-out lawyer in the 1987 TV movie “Sworn to Silence.”

He occasionally appeared in high-profile films in the 1990s, such as the theatrical version of “The Beverly Hillbillies” (1993) and the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan hit “You’ve Got Mail” (1998). However, he focused on television for the rest of his career.

Mr. Coleman played lawyers on two CBS series: the legal drama “The Guardian” from 2001 to 2004 and the sitcom “Courting Alex,” which lasted just 13 episodes in 2006. (His character in both series was the protagonist’s father – Simon Baker in The Guardian, Jenna Elfman in Courting Alex.) He also appeared in the first two seasons of Boardwalk Empire, the acclaimed HBO drama, set in Atlantic City, New Jersey, during Prohibition, the mentor of the corrupt politician, played by Steve Buscemi.

In 2011, prior to production of the second season of “Boardwalk Empire,” Mr. Coleman was diagnosed with throat cancer; His scenes were shot quickly to allow time for his treatment and recovery. He returned to the series at the end of the season when his character was ultimately murdered.

In recent years, he has appeared in episodes of “Ray Donovan,” “NCIS,” and “Yellowstone.”

Mr. Coleman’s first marriage, to Ann Herrell, ended in divorce after two years in 1959. In 1961 he married actress Carol Jean Hale; They divorced in 1983. In addition to his daughter Quincy, he had three other children. Complete information about his survivors was not immediately available.

In an interview with New York Magazine in 2010, Mr. Coleman reflected with pleasure on the list of rapscallions he had played over the years.

“It’s fun to play these roles,” he said. “You can do unusual things; Things you probably want to do in real life but just don’t because you’re a civilized person.”