One of the earliest movies I remember seeing is 9 to 5, so I had known who Dabney Coleman was for a long time. His performance as the sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot Frank Hart in the movie was so perfect. Coleman was able to balance the awful, cold-hearted sleaze with the sardonic, goofy, gullible side the character needed.
Frank Hart is the main antagonistic of the movie who treats the women under him as if they’re his maids or potential sexual conquests. It’s so easy for a director to have the wrong actor in the role. It helps the movie’s director was Colin Higgins who made the dark comedies Harold and Maude and Foul Play. But Coleman had mostly been known as a character actor before this in popular movies like The Towering Inferno, Rolling Thunder and Bite the Bullet. He had also played Merle Jeeter on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and had a memorable role as a bigoted father on Diff’rent Strokes who doesn’t want his sick daughter sharing a hospital room with Arnold Jackson (Gary Coleman).
Coleman was having to be the Margaret Dumont male equivalent to leads Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin. It’s a wonderful casting that we can hate Frank so much that when he gets Parton’s character so mad that she threatens to shoot his manhood off, he sits shocked and we laugh as he squirms as she leaves. All three characters get stoned on cannabis and have a girl’s night as they joke about how’s they would kill him. This is where Coleman really shows his comic talents especially as he’s made to feel awkward as Parton’s character sexually harasses him for a change.
The movie would become a major hit and it was probably because he worked alongside Fonda he was cast in a smaller role in her next movie, the Oscar-winning On Golden Pond. This time, he was allowed to play a nice guy as the sympathetic fiance to Fonda’s character whose son played by Doug McKeon spends some time with the aging couple played Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn.
But the next year, he would return to playing the comic relief villain, Ron Carlisle, the director of the fictional daytime drama (not a soap opera!) Southwest General. He butts heads with the new cast member Dorothy Michaels not knowing she is Michael Dorsey, played by Dustin Hoffman in both role. The 1982 comedy is probably one of the best comedies ever with a wonderful ensemble that includes Jessica Lange in her Oscar-winning role. Carlisle is also the misogynistic somewhat boyfriend to Lange’s Julie Nichols. Along with the likes of Geena Davis, Bill Murray, Teri Garr, George Gaynes and Charles Durning to mention a few, he made Carlisle the self-centered man you’d love to hate. When Michael reveals during a live airing that he’s been pretending to be a woman, Carlisle comments that explains why “Dorothy” never liked him. Even during an outrageous revelation that has surprised everyone, he’s still just thinking of himself.
Some other roles would befall the actor in the 1980s which painted him in a better light. He was cast as a high-ranking civilian supervisor at NORAD in the techno-thriller WarGames. Then, he played the dual roles of Sgt. Hal Osborne, a widowed Air Force official living in San Antonio in the spy thriller Cloak & Dagger. He also played Jack Flack, the imaginary friend of the protagonist Davey Osborne, played by Henry Thomas as a follow-up to the success of E.T.
The movie was an attempt to cash in with the video game craze of the early 1980s. The plot has Davey coming in possession of an Atari video game that has some confidential high-tech security plans on it. Davey is chased by bad people around San Antonio being aided by Jack Flack. The movie was released in the summer of 1984 on a double-bill with another video game-oriented movie The Last Starfighter. However, it wasn’t as successful making just under $10 million at the box office.
Coleman said that even though he didn’t get along with director Richard Franklin, he enjoyed working with Thomas. He also said in a 2012 interview that many people would come up to him saying how they liked watching it with their fathers or sons. “That happens to me two or three times a year. It’s always either a father saying, ‘I saw that movie with my son’ or a son saying, ‘I saw it with my dad.’ But then they say, ‘Seeing that movie was very important in my life’. And that’s always very nice to hear,” he said.
But it seems that he had found himself typecast as the comic-relief villain. He had a cameo has a swindler posing as a theater producer in The Muppets Take Manhattan, a corrupt CIA supervisor in The Man With the One Red Shoe, a sleazy self-centered writer in Modern Problems, a Hugh Hefner-type in Dragnet where he takes with a lisp and a buck-toothed investment banker and sleazy stepfather to Bobcat Goldthwait in Hot to Trot. Yet, you can only do much co-starring with a talking horse.
Even though it wasn’t well reviewed, I found the action comedy Short Time to be a guilty pleasure. Coleman plays a Seattle cop nearing retirement who has his medical tests mixed up thinking he’s going to die within a few weeks. So, he decides to get killed in the line of duty so his estranged wife, played by Garr, and son will get his insurance money. The joke is that while he charges into danger during a high-speed chase but actually stopping it and getting commendations. Later when he tries to talk a person out of firebombing a convenience store, he gets another award even though he was expecting to die.
On TV, he played more likeable characters in The Slap Maxwell Story sitcom, which only lasted one season and the infamous Drexell’s Class which aired on Fox during its 1991-1992 season. As Slap Maxwell, he played a sports writer/columnist at a newspaper in the American Southwest. In Drexell’s Class, he played a corporate raider who finds himself having to teach at an elementary school in Cedar Bluffs, Iowa as part of a community service. It was an attempt at trying to bring the same brutish humor that had made Married…With Children so popular to the concept of school sitcoms. It didn’t work and was canceled. However, it’s most notable for some early roles for Jason Biggs and Brittany Murphy.
As he got older, he got cast in more grandfather roles and in You’ve Got Mail, he played the father of Tom Hanks’ character who got married to a younger woman and had a child. Meg Ryans’ character mistakes the child for the child of Hanks’ character. Hanks and Coleman had appeared in One Red Shoe together. He was also appear as the grandfather in the 2003 version of Where the Redfern Grows and periodically through the 2000s and 2010s in movies with his final film role in the 2016 Rules Don’t Apply.
He continued to work on TV appearing as Commodore Louis Kaestner in Broadwalk Empire and Burton Fallin in The Guardian. His last TV role was in 2019 on Yellowstone. His work on Broadwalk Empire would bring him two Screen Actor Guild Awards in 2010 and 2011 for Ensemble in a Drama Series. He also won a Golden Globe Award for his role as Slap Maxwell for which he was also nominated for an Emmy. He would be nominated six times for Primetime Emmys but only won once for TV movie Sworn to Silence for which he was also nominated for a Golden Globe.
Even though he’s mostly known for playing unlikeable characters, he had to ability to break through that typecasting. With 180 acting credits according to http://www.imdb.conm, he got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2014. On May 16, he passed away at the age of 92 at his house in Santa Monica, Calif.
What was your favorite role of his? Please comment.
Zane Says 