Gavin MacLeod

 

  1. Edward Asner, Mary Tyler Moore, TV,1970-1977.  The making of  the great Ed Asner.  Or, Edward at the time…He remembered it all in a Hollywood Reporter interview published – by chance –  three days before his death  at 91 on August 19,  2021.    “Yeah, they wanted me to audition for the boss,:” he told Scott Feinberg. “Gavin MacLeod preceded me at the reading. He said I’d be better suited for the role, and he was better suited for Murray. [And he was, winning two more episodes than Ed’s 166]. I plodded through the reading and Jim Brooks said, ‘That was a very intelligent reading.’ And I mumbled: ‘Yeah, but it wasn’t funny.”’ They said: We want you to read it all-out, like a crazy, wild, meshuga, nutso.” So I read it that way… and they laughed. I came back and read with Mary. After I had the job, they told me that Mary said:’ Are you sure?’ And they said: ‘That’s your Lou Grant.”  Which became his next MTM series, 114 chapters  of the newspaper city editor  Lou Grant, 1977-1982., with his, or indeed Ed’s liberal heart on  his sleeve.1970-1977.  

  2. Carroll O’Connpr, All in the Family, TV, 1971-1979.   He was greatly relieved when O’Connor became Archie Bunker in  the US re-make of the BBC’s  abrasive ill Death Us Do Part, 1966-1975. “This is not the script for me,” MacLeod recalled in his memoir. “The character is too much of a bigot. I can’t say these things.”  Instead, he went sailing as  the patrician skipper of The Love  Boat, for ten  years from  1977.

 Birth year: 1931Death year: 2021Other name: Casting Calls:  0