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GREENSBORO — He played TV newsman Lou Grant, voiced character Carl Fredricksen in the 2009 film “Up” and now appears in the new CMT sitcom “Working Class.”

At 81, veteran actor Edward “Ed” Asner has no plans to play the real-life role of a retiree.

He continues to add acting credits, which have won him seven Emmy Awards and five Golden Globe Awards.

He spent time in Guilford County a year ago, when he filmed his lead role in the movie “Elephant Sighs” in High Point. (The film is still seeking a distributor.)

On Friday, Asner returns to take on another role: Playing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a one-man show, “FDR,” at the Carolina Theatre.

A longtime liberal political activist, Asner portrays one of his heroes. He plays the 32nd president as he reflects on his 12 years in office, coping with the Great Depression, economic reform and World War II.

“I worship Roosevelt,” Asner says from his Los Angeles office.

“I don’t think we have seen the likes of him since and probably never will.

“The America he made was a great and powerful and strong America. His successors did not keep it that way.”

Playwright Isadore “Dore” Schary wrote the one-man show as a sequel to his 1958 play “Sunrise at Campobello,” about FDR’s struggle with polio.

Asner has started his third year of touring as FDR, which comes with its challenges. Although there is plenty of drama in the play, there also is humor.

“Once I get that first laugh, I relax,” he says.

He acts nonstop for an hour and 40 minutes without intermission, in a role he describes as physically taxing but enjoyable.

“I don’t sound like him. I don’t look like him,” Asner says. “I have to create the fantasy that I am he.”

To convey Roosevelt’s paralysis, Asner enters in a wheelchair and uses two canes when he walks.

FDR relives conversations with key figures in his professional and personal life, and he briefly addresses his longtime affair with his wife’s social secretary, Lucy Mercer.

“He has an imaginary conversation with his daughter, who presses him on it,” Asner says. “He says that her mother understood.”

As he has played the president, Asner naturally has learned more about him.

“He had a flair for the dramatic and a great comedic sense,” Asner says.

“He knew how to play people. He used them against each other and played them and got the best of them. ... From them he was able to select the best assets, the best contributions and weave them together into his program of progressivism.”

That program, Asner says, “gave us phenomenal social achievements that shaped this country — Social Security, the eight-hour (work) day, old-age pensions, minimum wage for women and children. … He was arming the country at the same time because we didn’t have an Army worth a toot.”
Asner says he hopes his audience gains “a recognition of what a great president is really like, what an activist president should be like.”

“Here was a man who basically couldn’t get out of that wheelchair,” Asner says. “He overcame insuperable odds in conquering his polio to get the strength to become president of the United States.”

Contact Dawn DeCwikiel-Kane at 373-5204 or dawn.kane@news-record.com