Acting legend Ed Asner has died, Variety reports. He was 91.
Asner is known to modern audiences most for his role as Carl Fredricksen in Pixar's Up, where he played the curmudgeonly old man who tied hundreds of balloons to his home and embarked on an adventure alongside Doug the dog and "Junior Wilderness Explorer" Russell.
A publicist for Asner confirmed the actor's death to Variety, stating Asner died on Sunday surrounded by his family.
Asner's big break as an actor was the Mary Tyler Moore Show, which ran from 1970 to 1977. Asner played the grumpy newsroom producer Lou Grant, Moore's boss. Asner won three Emmy awards for best supporting actor for his role on the show. The Lou Grant character proved so popular he got his own spinoff, a more serious in tone hour-long series simply titled "Lou Grant." Asner similarly won two Emmy awards for his work on Rich Man, Poor Man and Roots. Asner appeared as Santa in Will Ferrel's Elf.
Asner told CNN in 2010 that he had never seen a Pixar movie until Wall-E, which debuted one year before Up.
"I was shocked to see how adult [Wall-E] was, with the setting in our lives, both present and future, and how they dealt with it. … And then quite relieved to find that the one I was working on, "Up," how adult it was," Asner said. If I would fault the producers [and] distributors in any way [it's that] they didn't find some better way to immediately make adults realize that this was as much for them as for kids. … My God, that four-minute passage in there detailing their life together. We all wish that our lives could be displayed as beautifully as that one is."
Asner's more recent roles include appearances on Grace & Frankie, Netflix's Cobra Kai, voices on American Dad, and The Boondocks. The hugely positive reception to Up reinvigorated interest in the actor's presence, landing him spots on Law & Order: SVU, The Middle, and Hawaii Five-0.
Asner is survived by his four children.
Joseph Knoop is a producer/writer for IGN.