Ed Asner, Award-Winning Actor Who Played Lou Grant, Dies At 91

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/29/ [login to see] /ed-asner-award-winning-actor-who-played-lou-grant-dies-at-91
Ed Asner was born on November 15, 1929, in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in Kansas City, Kansas. His Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant parents, Lizzie (née Seliger; 1885–1967, from Russia), a housewife, and Morris David Asner (1877–1957, from Lithuania (Vilna Governorate or Grodno Governorate)), ran a second-hand shop and junkyard. He was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family and given the Hebrew name Yitzhak.

Asner attended Wyandotte High School in Kansas City, Kansas, and the University of Chicago. He studied journalism in Chicago until a professor advised him there was little money to be made in the profession. He had been working in a steel mill, but he quickly switched to drama, debuting as the martyred Thomas Becket in a campus production of T.S. Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral." He eventually dropped out of school, going to work as a taxi driver, worked on the assembly line for General Motors, and other odd jobs before being drafted in the military in 1951. Asner served with the U.S. Army Signal Corps from 1951 to 1953 and appeared in plays that toured Army bases in Europe.