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Ed Asner: Roles
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Asner was a member of the Playwrights Theatre Company in Chicago, but left for New York before members of that company regrouped as the Compass Players in the mid-1950s. He later made guest appearances with the successor to Compass, Second City, and is considered part of the Second City extended family. Asner has ... had an extensive voice acting career. He provided the voices for J. Jonah Jameson on the 1990s animated television series Spider-Man, Hudson on Gargoyles, Jabba the Hutt on the radio version of Star Wars, Master Vrook from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel, Roland Daggett on Batman: The Animated Series, Cosgrove on Freakazoid, Ed Wuncler on The Boondocks, and Granny Goodness in various DC Comics animated series. Both he and his late friend Linda Gary voiced many cartoons for the Filmation company. In 1993, he narrated the short documentary Legacy for Efrain, which explores the impact of the nonprofit world hunger organization Heifer International.
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For Asner, who has played a range of characters from comedy to drama throughout his career, it was the human aspect of the role that brought him to the production. "One of the reasons Bryan is, to me, so appealing, is because this is a man shown under great stress and conflict to the point that he dies four or five days after the trial," said Asner.
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When Asner was a young adult, the House Un-American Activities Committee rolled into Tinseltown to root out Reds from the film industry. Studio moguls fanned McCarthyism by putting suspect screenwriters on an employment blacklist.
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After serving two years in France in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, Asner returned to Chicago where he appeared with the Playwrights Theater and trained with the Second City. In 1955 he moved to New York, where he made his Broadway debut with Jack Lemmon in Face of A Hero, performed with the American and New York Shakespeare Festivals and appeared in numerous off-Broadway roles including Mr. Peachum in a legendary revival of The Threepenny Opera.
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Union leader has proven Asner's most enduring role. He came here this week with two laid-off Enron workers to press demands for meaningful employee pension protection from Congress and to mobilize opposition to President Bush's plan to partially privatize Social Security.
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Asner is ... known for his acclaimed role as Captain Davies, from the mini-series Roots, the man who kidnapped Kunta Kinte and sold him into slavery, a role that earned Asner an Emmy Award. While Asner's character in Roots was highly developed, full of metaphors on tortured ethics and the morality of slavery, biographer Alex Haley would later admit he had no idea who the actual Captain was who had commanded the historic slaver which had kidnapped his ancestor.
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