While Dabney Coleman’s estimable career on film and television lasted nearly 60 years, most of that time was spent in small parts that might have been a bit tasty here and there, but the true peak of Dabney Coleman as an actor occurred during a slightly more that ten year window, beginning with his 148 episode run on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (created by the great Norman Lear), and largely ending with the well-reviewed, but short-lived, sitcom The Slap Maxwell Story, which was canceled in 1988. Coleman hardly disappeared after the “me” decade came to a close, but his best days were encompassed over that twelve year stretch. And let’s just say his best days were very, very good.
After breaking into on screen acting in 1961 with a guest spot on the series The Naked City, Coleman toiled away for 15 years performing in mostly bit parts on single episodes on TV, and the occasional film where his name could be far down the list of credits. The early stretch of his career did have some few and far between moments in high quality productions like The Scalphunters (directed by a young Sydney Pollack in ‘68), Downhill Racer with Redford and Hackman in ‘69, Cinderella Liberty across from James Caan and Marsha Mason in ‘73, and the Irwin Allen disaster epic The Towering Inferno one year later in 1974. But Coleman’s career roll didn’t start in earnest until 1977 with the elevated B movie revenge flick Rolling Thunder, directed by John Flynn and written by Paul Schrader.
Coleman’s part in Rolling Thunder may not have been huge, but it raised the eyebrows of many a casting director as the film (while controversial due to its violence) was both well-reviewed and seen, and remains a cult classic to this day.
From there, Coleman was cooking with gas. In the prescient football dram North Dallas Forty, Coleman played an executive suit whose concern for the athletes was in no way aligned with the health concerns of the athletes his team was putting on the field.
Coleman had a decidedly meaningful role as a judge in Jonathan Demme’s artistic breakthrough Melvin and Howard in 1980, starring Jason Robards (as an aging Howard Hughes), Mary Steenburgen, and Paul Lemat in Demme’s acclaimed and Oscar-nominated drama.
But it would be later that year in the massive comedic hit film 9 to 5 where Coleman would achieve his own breakthrough as one of the great sexist, lecherous bosses in film history. His comeuppance at the hands of Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton delighted audiences to no end, and, in its own lighthearted way, the film spoke to women of all stripes who had suffered under such a manager—putting up with a pinch on the cheek and off-color comments.
Coleman’s success in 9 to 5 was met with a complete u-turn just one year later as he starred again with Jane Fonda as her sympathetic fiancée in the highly successful drama On Golden Pond with Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn in very late career roles. The performance showed a different, softer, and more comforting side of Coleman.
It wouldn’t be long though before Coleman would be called upon again to play sexist and lecherous again, this time in Sydney Pollack’s classic 1982 comedy, Tootsie, starring Dustin Hoffman as a struggling actor who pretends to be a woman to get a lead role on a soap opera. Tootsie is one of the best comedies of the ‘80s and in no small part due to Coleman’s predatory, casting couch director of a daytime drama.
1983 would bring another huge hit with John Badham’s Cold War adventure War Games starring Matthew Broderick. Coleman stars as a scientist named Mckittrick who believes nuclear warheads should be automated and not subject to human intervention. War Games was a prescient entertainment that spoke of the removal of human contact from key structural safety and defense systems. The film becomes a race against the clock to avoid an annihilation that Coleman’s short-sided character sets in motion.
That same year, Coleman took on the lead role in the sitcoms Buffalo Bill. In a rare lead, Coleman excels as a small time talk show host looking to break into the big leagues while making all those around him miserable in his efforts to do so. Buffalo Bill was widely-praised by critics, earned Coleman an Emmy nomination, but was perhaps too scabrous, too ahead of its time to last, and after receiving paltry ratings, was canceled after two highly regarded seasons.
After the failure of Buffalo Bill, Coleman had a delightful role in ‘84’s The Muppets Take Manhattan. Returning to television Coleman won the only Emmy of his career as best supporting actor in the hot button (at the time) TV movie Sworn to Silence, in which he played a co-defense counsel defending a serial killer who has shared the whereabouts of his victims’ bodies, but as his attorney, Coleman’s character is bound by client/attorney privilege.
Coleman took one more stab at series work in 1987 with the Slap Maxwell Story, playing the title character of a sportswriter who is too old school for his own good. Much like Buffalo Bill, Slap’s personality is not only off-putting, but gets in the way of his own potential for success. Despite being nominated for an Emmy once again, The Slap Maxwell Story didn’t even make it to a second season and Coleman never got another lead opportunity on a series.
Earlier in ‘87, Coleman gave my favorite performance in any show or film ever, with Dan Aykroyd’s comedic take on the stoic ‘60s detective series Dragnet, co-starring Tom Hanks. The film was met with respectable box office and modest reviews, and unfortunately (by my eyes) never got a green light for a sequel. I found it to be one of Aykroyd’s finest, and most disciplined lead performances, and Hanks as his pain in the ass right hand Pep Strebek was a complete stitch. But it was Coleman in a small role as Jerry Caesar, a distributor of pornographic magazines with an exaggerated lisp who bent me backwards with laughter. Just to hear Coleman say the word “Manifesto” in his invented speaking cadence is still to this day one of the funniest words I’ve ever heard an actor say. Not because of the word itself, but how Coleman says it. It’s nothing. It’s a throwaway. Except that it wasn’t. Not the way Coleman did it.
After that decade plus of success, Coleman kept at it for another thirty years, and while there were some upticks down the home stretch (such as Columbo—which earned him a guest actor Emmy nod, You’ve Got Mail, Moonlight Mile, Domino—I love Domino, sue me–he had his most significant late career turn as “the Commodore” on Boardwalk Empire, and also appeared on Ray Donovan, and a part in what would appears to be Warren Beatty’s final film Rules Don’t Apply), they became fewer and farther between.
But for that one decade and change, Dabney Coleman was one of the most in-demand and reliably excellent character actors in the business.
Coleman had a very particular skill set. He could be menacing, flinty, and dastardly with an uncommon ease, yet somehow those skills translated to a cantankerous form of comedy that for a sizable stretch in the ‘70s and ‘80s seemed to belong to him and only him. There was a market during those peak years for Dabney Coleman, and it belonged to him.
That stretch of high-grade brilliance was a “manifesto” of its own.
Dabney Coleman died on May 16, 2024. He was 92 years old.