Lou Grant has gone into that good night. He was described in an obit as “a guy with tender emotions but did not plan to show them; a strong aura of professional and personal integrity; a fear that he had outlived his era.” Ed himself said that his character was “a guy with a common core of honor.” All that sounded to me a lot like what might have been imbibed in a U of C HUM class in the fifties in a discussion of the ethos of Hector or perhaps Achilles himself. Ed was a diligent attender of reunions. Granted that it’s difficult to imagine him decamping from a battle chariot or hurling a spear - that’s the sort of thing that would be left to matinee idols like NU’s Charlton Heston. No, I recognize in Ed one of ours - the bulldog persona, the penchant for lost causes off the screen, the hint of paranoia, the ability to accept the brickbats hurled by the world. Harvard can have its Matt Damon, Yale can have its Jodie Foster, I’ll take Ed. Lacking every other actorly advantage, he became perhaps the most popular figure in the world of entertainment ever produced by the U of C. Granted, that’s not saying much, as Lou himself might have said.
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