\n<\/p>\n
He remained a busy if relatively anonymous character actor for a decade after that, appearing on a wide range of both comedies and dramas on TV and in small parts in big movies like \u201cThe Towering Inferno\u201d (1974). Then, in 1976, he landed the role that would set the tone for much of his career: Merle Jeeter, the underhanded stage father of a child evangelist (and later the mayor of the fictional town of Fernwood), on Norman Lear\u2019s satirical soap opera \u201cMary Hartman, Mary Hartman.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Coleman later said of the series, \u201cIt had a very strange, off-the-wall type of humor, the key to which was playing it straight.\u201d It was, he added, \u201cwhere I got into this type of character.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was also, he said, when his jet-black mustache became an indispensable accessory to his retinue of unsavory characters. \u201cEverything changed\u201d when he grew the mustache, he later said. \u201cWithout it, I looked like Richard Nixon.\u201d<\/p>\n
If he was on his way to being typecast as an unrepentant lout, he made the most of it. \u201cMary Hartman, Mary Hartman\u201d was critically acclaimed but never a bona fide hit (neither was its follow-up, \u201cForever Fernwood,\u201d on which Mr. Coleman reprised his role). But Colin Higgins\u2019s 1980 ensemble comedy, \u201c9 to 5,\u201d was a box-office smash and Mr. Coleman\u2019s career breakthrough.<\/p>\n
His character, the boss of the office workers played by Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, was \u2014 as was said more than once in the movie, including by Mr. Coleman himself in a fantasy sequence \u2014 a \u201csexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.\u201d Reviewing \u201c9 to 5\u201d in The Times, Vincent Canby wrote that Mr. Coleman, playing a \u201clunatic villain,\u201d gave \u201cthe funniest performance in the film.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n