Dabney Coleman made the man in charge funny by letting him remain thoroughly unpleasant. His deadpan timing gave comic bosses a conviction that we relish, though scripts sometimes asked him to supply little else.
Fi1m perspective
Dabney Coleman's bosses speak with little apparent expectation of being challenged. His Texas drawl and deadpan timing let their self-importance remain intact while the audience laughs. We admire the restraint: he does not need to make an unpleasant man likeable to make him worth watching.
The useful turn came with Merle Jeeter in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976–77), followed by Franklin Hart Jr. in 9 to 5 (1980). Those parts established the comic authority figure who would recur through his work. He could be funny while giving the other performers good reason to dislike him.
In Sydney Pollack's Tootsie (1982), his Ron Carlisle is a chauvinist soap-opera director, a useful occupation for Coleman's particular sort of bully. The job gives his bossiness a respectable excuse. He fits comfortably into the alert supporting cast around Dustin Hoffman, giving the comedy a readily recognisable kind of workplace nuisance. We recommend the film warmly, with some scepticism about the lessons it starts teaching about women.
John Badham's WarGames (1983) gives his McKittrick a less satisfying job. We enjoyed his firm resistance to David, because Coleman makes the adult's certainty entertaining even when the script makes it too easy to dismiss. Alongside Barry Corbin's General Beringer, he supplies brisk opposition, but the adults are less persuasive than the teenagers. Parkes and Lasker ask for quick, definite responses where a little uncertainty might have given Coleman more to play. It is still a tense, funny thriller we recommend; our reservation is that he has too little room to make McKittrick more than an obstacle.
That is a limitation of the writing, rather than a reason to dismiss the actor. The lead role in Buffalo Bill (1983–84) exposed the difficulty of sustaining a series around an unlikeable man; Boardwalk Empire (2010) later gave him the dramatic part of the ruthless Commodore Louis Kaestner. The comic boss was not all he could do. Start with Tootsie, where the surrounding cast gives that well-practised unpleasantness plenty to work against.
Biography
Dabney Wharton Coleman was an American actor. He appeared in more than 60 films and numerous television programmes over six decades, often in supporting roles as egomaniacal or unlikeable authority figures.
Coleman trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York with Sanford Meisner from 1958 to 1960. He made his Broadway debut in the short-lived play A Call on Kuprin in 1961. His film roles include 9 to 5 (1980), On Golden Pond (1981), Tootsie (1982) as Ron Carlisle, and WarGames (1983). On television he played the title characters in the series Buffalo Bill (1983–1984) and The Slap Maxwell Story (1987–1988), Burton Fallin in The Guardian (2001–2004), and Louis “The Commodore” Kaestner in Boardwalk Empire (2010–2011). He also voiced Principal Peter Prickly in the animated series Recess (1997–2001).
Coleman received one Primetime Emmy Award and one Golden Globe Award.
