The Emmy winner who was deliciously hateable
Dabney Coleman delighted in playing cads. Over a varied career spanning nearly six decades and 175 roles, he found his niche portraying comically self-centered male chauvinists who often got a richly deserved comeuppance. In 1980's 9 to 5, he played what Jane Fonda's character called "a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot" of a boss and ended up getting hogtied and hung from a ceiling by fed-up female employees. Two years later, in Tootsie, his sexist, butt-slapping soap opera director is chewed out by an indignant, cross-dressing Dustin Hoffman. By all accounts, Coleman was nothing like these slimeballs — at least outwardly. "When I meet a person I don't like, I make a notation about what it is I don't like about them," he said in 1983, "and hopefully I can integrate that into a part."
Coleman, whose Texas drawl "was a part of almost every role," was the youngest of four sons of an Austin military veteran, said Texas Monthly. Uncertain what career to follow, he found himself "failing out of law school." Then he met a movie star, got bitten by the acting bug, and moved to New York City the next day. His TV career, interrupted by two years of military service, began in 1960 with roles on Dr. Kildare, I Dream of Jeannie, and That Girl. Coleman "remained a busy if relatively anonymous character actor," said The New York Times, until he achieved a career-defining breakthrough in 1976 playing a smarmy small town mayor and "underhanded stage father of a child evangelist" in the offbeat satirical soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Offers to play a rich variety of "unsavory characters" followed — a turnaround he partially credited to growing his trademark mustache. "Without it," he later said, "I looked like Richard Nixon."
Although "audiences were repulsed" by his turn as an obnoxious TV talk show host in the 1983 sitcom Buffalo Bill, said New York magazine, the character is now considered to have been the first great sitcom antihero. Coleman's "greatest late-in-life monster role," in HBO's 2010–14 gangster epic Boardwalk Empire, was a bullying, predatory mentor to Steve Buscemi's Nucky Thompson. Such roles, he said, made his job fun. "You get to do outlandish things, things that you want to do, probably, in real life," he said in 2010. "But you just don't, because you're a civilized human being." |