As Dabney Coleman became a regular on television, he also began appearing in Hollywood films (via IMDb), including the disaster cinema classic “The Towering Inferno,” “North Dallas Forty,” and “Melvin and Howard.” He kicked off the 1980s with an appearance as an evil boss who faces a hilarious, much deserved comeuppance from a trio of disgruntled employees played by Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin in the classic comedy “9 to 5,” per Turner Classic Movies. A year later, he reunited with Jane Fonda, playing her husband alongside acting legends Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn in the Academy Award-winning “On Golden Pond.” In 1982, The Character was back again when Coleman played a sexist soap opera director in another critical and commercial hit, “Tootsie.”
In 1983, Coleman began a run on critically acclaimed television shows that failed to find their audiences. He starred as an overbearing talk show host on “Buffalo Bill,” earning two Emmy nominations, and went on to play the title role of a curmudgeonly sportswriter in “The Slap Maxwell Story,” for which he won a Golden Globe. Coleman won more awards for the HBO biopic “Murrow,” in which he played CBS executive William S. Paley as well as the legal drama miniseries “Sworn To Silence.” He went back to television in the early 1990s, starring in the sitcom “Drexel’s Class,” in which he played a former CEO who becomes a middle school teacher, and “Madman of the People,” appearing as an acerbic newspaper columnist.
