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Dabney Coleman Was the Perfect Onscreen Jerk
Maybe likeability is overrated.
Coleman’s signature role was the sexist boss in the 1980 smash 9 to 5:a man so loathsome, pompous, and useless that each of the film’s three put-upon leads, played by Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin, got her own scene in which she turns the tables on him. Before 9 to 5 made him a movie-posters name, he played the hard-driving coach of Robert Redford’s hotshot skier in Downhill Racer and the fire chief in the 1974 disaster film The Towering Inferno,who was mainly there to be a foil for the heroes (Gleason and Atherton’s Die Hard characters were his descendants): Steve McQueen’s heroic firefighter and Paul Newman’s architect. The mentor of Steve Buscemi’s civic leader and gang boss, the Commodore is a racist and misogynist bully who’s so abusive that his own housekeeper tries to poison him, and a rapist and pedophile who impregnates one of the show’s heroines, Gillian Darmody (Gretchen Mol), as a child.
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