Dabney Coleman, a Texas-born character actor who created an acclaimed gallery of comically macho throwbacks in films including “9 to 5” and “Tootsie” and TV shows such as “The Slap Maxwell Story” and “Buffalo Bill,” died May 16 at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 92.
Dabney Coleman, actor who portrayed comic scoundrels, dies at 92
He created an acclaimed gallery of comically macho throwbacks in films including “9 to 5” and “Tootsie” and TV shows such as “The Slap Maxwell Story” and “Buffalo Bill.”
Updated May 18, 2024 at 6:54 p.m. EDT|Published May 17, 2024 at 6:21 p.m. EDT
Tall, mustachioed, athletic and with a slight twang to his speech, Mr. Coleman bore a swaggering intensity that he put in the service almost wholly of comedy. He became a household name in the late 1970s as a smarmy small-town mayor, Merle Jeeter, on the sitcoms “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” and “Fernwood Tonight.”
He was called on time and again to provide variations on that persona — pitiable lechers, conniving bosses, vain cretins who operate under a veneer of old-school propriety. Film critic Leonard Maltin once wrote that Mr. Coleman “raised the portrayal of comic jerks and loudmouths to an art form.”
He found his critical breakthrough in “9 to 5” (1980), portraying a predatory manager who seeks sexual conquest in the secretarial pool and gets his comeuppance courtesy of co-stars Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin. Fonda called the movie, which explores unequal pay and other festering inequities of the modern workplace, a “feminist revenge fantasy.”
In the film’s most cathartic sequence, Mr. Coleman’s character desperately seeks safety from a mob of angry employees, pleading, “I’m not such a bad guy.”
“You’re a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot,” Fonda, clad in a safari outfit and wielding a shotgun, replies.
“So I have a few faults. Who doesn’t?”
The next year, Mr. Coleman had a rare sympathetic part as Fonda’s dentist boyfriend in the drama “On Golden Pond” before returning to his unsavory bread-and-butter. He was a chauvinistic soap-opera director in “Tootsie” (1982), a hard-edged computer scientist in “WarGames” (1983), a seedy Broadway producer in “The Muppets Take Manhattan” (1984), a lisping smut peddler in “Dragnet” (1987) and an ignorant police chief in the slapstick comedy “Amos & Andrew” (1993).
On TV, he was among the first sitcom leading men with few redeeming values, memorably playing an insensitive talk-show host on NBC’s “Buffalo Bill.” The program ran for only 26 episodes in 1983 and 1984 but drew a devoted following over the years for the astringent performance by Mr. Coleman, who in character tells one guest, “I don’t care what the jury said, you look like a rapist to me” and reassures his latest love interest, “You’re better than 90 percent of those bimbos out there.”
Network television had long featured obnoxious characters, but usually as foils or leavened with endearing equalities. Carroll O’Connor made Archie Bunker on “All in the Family” into “a lovable bigot,” in the words of producer Norman Lear, but Mr. Coleman played Bill Bittinger as a misanthropic weasel to the core.
“We were trying to do something different and dangerous,” NBC Entertainment president Brandon Tartikoff told Time magazine. “Dangerous meaning the possibly lousy ratings you could get by putting on a character as despicable as Bill” as the star.
New York Times TV critic John J. O’Connor wrote that Mr. Coleman’s Emmy-nominated performance “brilliantly captures the fine madness of the . . . compleat egomaniac, living one step removed from the rest of humanity except for those moments when he instinctively senses an opportunity to score a self-serving point. Turning seemingly human for a few moments, he wheedles and cajoles with what he deems to be the ultimate in charm, and then returns to being utterly and hopelessly impossible.”
Mr. Coleman teased a slightly more filtered and humane performance — without losing any of the tartness — in “The Slap Maxwell Story,” which ran on ABC in 1987 and 1988. He played a fedora-wearing sports columnist who, unlike Bill, understands boundaries of decency but nevertheless struggles to remain within them. He again was Emmy-nominated.
In addition, Mr. Coleman co-starred as the villain opposite Carol Burnett in “Fresno” (1986), CBS’s soap-opera parody about rival California raisin magnates. He managed to impress critics and audiences in straight dramatic parts, as CBS chairman William S. Paley in the HBO film “Murrow” (1986) and as a lawyer involved in a landmark custody battle involving a surrogate mother in the ABC-TV film “Baby M” (1988).
Mr. Coleman won an Emmy for best supporting actor in the ABC television movie “Sworn to Silence” (1987), in which he and Peter Coyote play lawyers who face a community backlash for invoking attorney-client privilege in a murder case.
Mr. Coleman could be as playfully sarcastic as many of his characters, a trait he displayed at the Emmy ceremony when producer Steven Bochco pridefully discussed his much-honored show “Hill Street Blues.” “We told NBC we would only do the show if we could have creative autonomy,” Bochco said, “and you can see the result.”
When Mr. Coleman took the stage to celebrate his win for “Sworn to Silence,” he mocked the pompous intonation: “They asked me if I wanted to do the part, and I said, ‘Hell, no, I don’t want to do the part,’ then extracted from them a promise of artistic autonomy — and here I am!”
Sadness and anger
Dabney Wharton Coleman was born in Austin on Jan. 3, 1932. He was the youngest of four children and was 4 when his father, a businessman and cotton farmer, died of pneumonia at 39 amid the Depression. “There was such emptiness,” he recalled to Parade magazine six decades later. “I had sadness and such great anger inside me. I’m still angry. I think that sorrow has made me what I am.”
He grew up in Corpus Christi, part of an extended family of lawyers and doctors. He was expected to follow a similar professional path but instead found that college classes — initially at the Virginia Military Institute and later at the University of Texas — interfered with chasing women and playing table tennis at fraternity houses.
He was newly married and had just flunked out of a law-school program at Texas when an encounter in 1958 with Texas-born film star Zachary Scott — a friend of his first wife’s — proved transformative.
Scott stopped by their apartment for a drink, and Mr. Coleman said he was so smitten with the actor’s style and charisma that he flew to New York the next day and enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse acting workshop. Mr. Coleman soon made his TV debut, as a corpse, which he followed with a dozen years of brief film and TV parts.
His marriages, to Ann Harrell and model-actress Jean Hale, ended in divorce. Survivors include a daughter from his first marriage, Meghan Coleman; three children from his second marriage, singer-songwriter Quincy Coleman, Randy Coleman and Kelly Coleman; a sister; and five grandchildren.
Mr. Coleman’s later films included “You’ve Got Mail” (1998), in which he played Tom Hanks’s much-married father. He had guest roles on TV series ranging from the animated Disney-produced series “Recess” to HBO’s drama “Boardwalk Empire,” in which he played a former Atlantic City power broker with a predilection for young girls.
If Mr. Coleman felt he had been stereotyped over the years, he never betrayed those sentiments publicly. He once told People magazine that he embraced the ability to channel his darkest emotions — anger and petulance, among them — into something productive.
“I’m a little bit of a chauvinist if that means being an ambitious, self-serving person,” he said. “I don’t consider myself an evil S.O.B., but it is fun to play those characters because they are so well defined.”
