He remained a busy if comparatively nameless character actor for a decade after that, showing on a variety of each comedies and dramas on TV and in small elements in large motion pictures like “The Towering Inferno” (1974). Then, in 1976, he landed the function that may set the tone for a lot of his profession: Merle Jeeter, the underhanded stage father of a kid evangelist (and later the mayor of the fictional city of Fernwood), on Norman Lear’s satirical cleaning soap opera “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.”
Mr. Coleman later mentioned of the sequence, “It had a really unusual, off-the-wall kind of humor, the important thing to which was taking part in it straight.” It was, he added, “the place I bought into the sort of character.”
It was additionally, he mentioned, when his jet-black mustache grew to become an indispensable accent to his retinue of unsavory characters. “All the things modified” when he grew the mustache, he later mentioned. “With out it, I regarded like Richard Nixon.”
If he was on his method to being typecast as an unrepentant lout, he made essentially the most of it. “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” was critically acclaimed however by no means a bona fide hit (neither was its follow-up, “Eternally Fernwood,” on which Mr. Coleman reprised his function). However Colin Higgins’s 1980 ensemble comedy, “9 to five,” was a box-office smash and Mr. Coleman’s profession breakthrough.
His character, the boss of the workplace employees performed by Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, was — as was mentioned greater than as soon as within the film, together with by Mr. Coleman himself in a fantasy sequence — a “sexist, egotistical, mendacity, hypocritical bigot.” Reviewing “9 to five” in The Occasions, Vincent Canby wrote that Mr. Coleman, taking part in a “lunatic villain,” gave “the funniest efficiency within the movie.”
