Dabney Coleman, the mustachioed character actor who specialised in smarmy villains like the chauvinist boss in 9 to 5 and the nasty TV director in Tootsie, has died. He was 92.
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Coleman died on Thursday, his daughter Quincy Coleman told The Hollywood Reporter. No other details were immediately available.
"The great Dabney Coleman literally created, or defined, really - in a uniquely singular way - an archetype as a character actor. He was so good at what he did it's hard to imagine movies and television of the last 40 years without him," Ben Stiller wrote on X.
For two decades Coleman laboured in movies and TV shows as a talented but largely unnoticed performer. That changed abruptly in 1976 when he was cast as the incorrigibly corrupt mayor of the hamlet of Fernwood in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a satirical soap opera that was so over the top no network would touch it.
A six-footer with an ample black moustache, Coleman went on to make his mark in numerous popular films, including as a stressed out computer scientist in War Games, Tom Hanks' father in You've Got Mail and a fire fighting official in The Towering Inferno.
He won a Golden Globe for The Slap Maxwell Story and an Emmy Award for best supporting actor in Peter Levin's 1987 small screen legal drama Sworn to Silence. Some of his recent credits include "Ray Donovan" and a recurring role on Boardwalk Empire, for which he won two Screen Actors Guild Awards.
In the groundbreaking 1980 hit 9 to 5, he was the "sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot" boss who tormented his unappreciated female underlings - Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton - until they turned the tables on him.
In 1981, he was Fonda's caring, well-mannered boyfriend, who asks her father (played by her real-life father, Henry Fonda) if he can sleep with her during a visit to her parents' vacation home in On Golden Pond.
Opposite Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, he was the obnoxious director of a daytime soap opera that Hoffman's character joins by pretending to be a woman.
Among Coleman's other films were North Dallas Forty, Cloak and Dagger, Dragnet, Meet the Applegates, Inspector Gadget and Stuart Little. He reunited with Hoffman as a land developer in Brad Silberling's Moonlight Mile with Jake Gyllenhaal.
As he aged, he also began to put his mark on pompous authority figures, notably in 1998's My Date With The President's Daughter, in which he was not only an egotistical, self-absorbed president of the United States, but also a clueless father to a teenager girl.
Early credits included such TV shows as Ben Casey, Dr Kildare, The Outer Limits, Bonanza, The Mod Squad and the film The Towering Inferno. He appeared on Broadway in 1961 in A Call On Kuprin. He played Kevin Costner's father on Yellowstone.
Twice divorced, Coleman is survived by four children, Meghan, Kelly, Randy and Quincy.
Australian Associated Press
