Dabney Coleman, known for his roles in 9 to 5 and Boardwalk Empire has died. The Emmy Award-winning actor leaves behind decades of playing some of the least likable characters in film, from power brokers to sexist TV directors to backstabbing bosses who get their just desserts. Coleman took on the role of the jerk willingly and with good humor that his daughter, singer Quincy Coleman, says “tickled the funny bone of humanity.” Coleman was 92 when he died yesterday at his home in Santa Monica; his cause of death has not yet been released.
Dabney Coleman, Known For Playing “Bad Guys”, Has Passed Away
Dabney Coleman got his first on-screen role in 1961, playing a nameless resident in Naked City, an ABC police drama series. For the next decade and a half, Coleman would continue to star in minor roles in I Dream of Jeannie and Room 222, among other titles. Still, the role defining the rest of his career came in 1976, when he played Mayor Mertle Jeeter in the satirical soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.
Coleman himself described Jeeter as “[the] worst human being” in an AV Club interview from 2012, but went on to say that taking the role was “the best thing I ever did” because it gave audiences a taste for his negative style of humor and paved the way for many more of his jerk-ish roles to come. In 1980, he would star alongside Dolly Parton in her debut movie 9 to 5, where he played Parton’s scummy boss Franklin Hart, Jr. He would continue to cement his reputation for “bad guys” with a sexist TV director in Tootsie (1982), the head systems engineer in WarGames (1983), and an absurdly rich bank CEO in the 1993 movie version of Beverly Hillbillies.
Dabney Coleman: The 21st Century “Jerk” Who Was Actually Pretty Good
Dabney Coleman’s trend of playing jerks followed him to the modern day, with him serving as the voice for Principal Peter Prickly in Recess (1997) and starring as Burton Fallin, a lawyer and the estranged father of the protagonist Nick Fallin (Simon Baker) in CBS’s The Guardian (2001). 2010 would see Dabney Coleman board HBO’s period crime drama Boardwalk Empire, where he would star alongside Steve Buscemi, Michael Pitt, and Michael Shannon as Commodore Louis Kaestner, the cruel and perverted boss of Atlantic City’s bootlegging scene.
When Vulture sat down with Dabney Coleman in a 2010 interview and asked him if he minded playing such horrible people, his response was a little unexpected.
“Itโs fun playing those roles. You get to do outlandish things, things that you want to do, probably, in real life but you just donโt because youโre a civilized human being. There are no holds barred when youโre playing [jerks] โ I couldnโt imagine anyone not loving playing those parts.”
Dabney Coleman via Vulture
Of course, when he wasn’t in front of the camera, Dabney Coleman was a perfectly normal man with a sense of humor about his work that lasted until he died. He served in the US Army in the 1950s, and was married and divorced twice, first to Ann Courtney Harrell and then to Jean Hale. His daughter, singer/songwriter/producer Quincy Coleman (Waitress) gave The Hollywood Reporter the following statement following her father’s death:
“My father crafted his time here on Earth with a curious mind, a generous heart and a soul on fire with passion, desire and humor that tickled the funny bone of humanity…As he lived, he moved through this final act of his life with elegance, excellence and mastery.”
Quincy Coleman via The Hollywood Reporter
Dabney Coleman is survived by his daughters Quincy, Kelly, and Meghan, his son Randy, and his grandchildren Hale, Gabe, Luie, Kai, and Coleman.
