Within the 1980 workplace comedy hit movie 9 to five, Jane Fonda, as one in all three long-suffering workplace staff subjected to infinite harassment by their male chauvinist boss, performed by Dabney Coleman, finally will get to name him a “sexist, egotistical, mendacity, hypocritical, bigot”, albeit in her creativeness. These epithets may apply to a majority of the various roles performed by Coleman, who has died aged 92.
With thinning hair and a fleshy, seemingly pleasant face, adorned most of the time with a sly moustache, Coleman made his lengthy profession portraying deceptively atypical, slippery bastards. He performed “the person you like to hate” in each dramas and comedies in an identical straight vogue.
Because the obnoxious Mr Hart, on whom the sisterhood of Dolly Parton, Fonda and Lily Tomlin wreak their revenge in 9 to five, Coleman outlined the authoritative, conceited and misogynistic archetype of a technology.
It was by way of his theatre faculty friendship with the director Sydney Pollack that Coleman had his break, in Pollack’s movement image debut The Slender Thread (1965), starring Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft. Pollack additionally gave Coleman roles in three of his additional movies: This Property Is Condemned (1966), The Scalphunters (1968) and Tootsie (1982). Within the third of those, he’s reliably disagreeable because the sexist cleaning soap opera director who makes a go at TV star Dorothy Michaels (Dustin Hoffman).
Born in Austin, Texas, Dabney was the son of Mary (nee Johns) and Melvin Coleman, a cotton grower who died when he was 4.
He entered the Virginia Army Institute in 1949. After being known as up in 1953 to the US Military and serving in Europe, Coleman studied regulation on the College of Texas, the place he did some performing earlier than, on the recommendation of the Hollywood actor and fellow Texan Zachary Scott, enrolling on the Neighborhood Playhouse Faculty of the Theater in New York. There, he studied performing below Sanford Meisner and struck up a friendship with Pollack.
Beginning out on the large display screen, Coleman performed a sleazy service provider in The Bother With Women (1969), starring Elvis Presley; a deputy hearth chief in The Towering Inferno (1974); and ski coach to Jill Kinmont (Marilyn Hassett) in The Different Facet of the Mountain (1975), an account of the disabled skier’s life.
Nevertheless, earlier than 9 to five propelled him from a supporting actor into an occasional main man, he was most celebrated within the spoof tv cleaning soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976-77), as Merle Jeeter, a sleazy politician.
Submit-Tootsie, he returned to tv as a number one man, and shortly discovered his area of interest in a number of different miniseries, similar to Buffalo Invoice (1983-84), by which he performed the conceited talkshow host Invoice Bittinger. Regardless of the unsympathetic title position, Coleman managed to disclose the character’s vulnerability, and obtained Emmy nominations for his delicate efficiency.
His main position in The Slap Maxwell Story (1987-88), by which he highlighted one other side of his macho display screen persona as a reactionary sports activities author, gained him one other Emmy nomination and a Golden Globe.
Again on the large display screen, he tapped into his means to precise sharp-edged humour within the well-liked however unbelievable Brief Time (1990), starring as a policeman who, months away from retirement, thinks he has a terminal sickness and tries to reap the benefits of his pension by trying to get killed on obligation. In the identical yr he appeared in drag – his signature moustache however – within the wacky Meet the Applegates.
Amongst his quite a few different film roles have been an against-type sympathetic boyfriend to Fonda reverse her father, Henry Fonda, in On Golden Pond (1981), a pc scientist in WarGames (1983), the skinflint banker Milburn Drysdale in The Beverly Hillbillies (1993), and police chief Quimby in Inspector Gadget (1999).
On tv once more for the latter a part of his profession, Coleman shone as an unscrupulous newspaper columnist in Madman of the Individuals (1994-95), a high-class lawyer in The Guardian (2001-04) and an Atlantic Metropolis energy dealer in Boardwalk Empire (2010-11).
Coleman was married and divorced twice, first to Ann Courtney Harrell (from 1957 to 1959), after which to the actor Jean Hale (from 1961 to 1983). He’s survived by 4 kids, Quincy, Randy, Kelly and Meghan, 5 grandchildren, and a sister, Beverley.
Dabney Wharton Coleman, actor, born 3 January 1932; died 16 Could 2024
