'A soul on fire with passion, desire'

Emmy Award-winning actor made his mark specializing in curmudgeons

- MARK KENNEDY

Dabney Coleman 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."

Dabney Coleman, the mustachioed character actor who specialized in smarmy villains like the chauvinist boss in "9 to 5" and the nasty TV director in "Tootsie," has died. He was 92. 

Coleman died Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, his daughter, Quincy Coleman, said in a statement to The Associated Press. She said he "took his last earthly breath peacefully and exquisitely."

"The great Dabney Coleman literally created, or defined, really-ina 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.