He remained a hectic if quite nameless personality actor for a decade next that, showing on a large area of each comedies and dramas on TV and in little portions in weighty motion pictures like “The Towering Inferno” (1974). Upcoming, in 1976, he landed the position that may all set the sound for a lot of his occupation: Merle Jeeter, the underhanded level father of a kid evangelist (and nearest the mayor of the fictitious the town of Fernwood), on Norman Lear’s satirical cleaning soap opera “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.”
Mr. Coleman nearest mentioned of the line, “It had a very strange, off-the-wall type of humor, the key to which was playing it straight.” It used to be, he added, “where I got into this type of character.”
It used to be additionally, he mentioned, when his jet-black mustache become an indispensable accent to his retinue of unsavory characters. “Everything changed” when he grew the mustache, he nearest mentioned. “Without it, I looked like Richard Nixon.”
If he used to be on his approach to being typecast as an unrepentant lout, he made essentially the most of it. “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” used to be seriously acclaimed however by no means a bona fide strike (neither used to be its follow-up, “Forever Fernwood,” on which Mr. Coleman reprised his position). However Colin Higgins’s 1980 ensemble comedy, “9 to 5,” used to be a box-office break and Mr. Coleman’s occupation leap forward.
His personality, the boss of the operate staff performed by means of Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, used to be — as used to be mentioned greater than as soon as within the film, together with by means of Mr. Coleman himself in a myth layout — a “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.” Reviewing “9 to 5” in The Instances, Vincent Canby wrote that Mr. Coleman, enjoying a “lunatic villain,” gave “the funniest performance in the film.”
