Jack Flack Always Escapes: Dabney Coleman (1932-2024) | Tributes

He had to be, really; after all, Fonda, Tomlin, and Parton were going to fantasize about, then act out, increasingly elaborate revenge fantasies against him, a crusade to emasculate the hypermasculine systems that stood in the way of work and wage equality. But Coleman plays him with such devilish relish, such unmitigated confidence in the supremacy of his sex and class, that watching his eyes bulge with each new indignity our heroic trio of ladies beset upon him is nothing short of delightful.

From there, he leveraged his “9 to 5” fame into not just more comedic roles (e.g. his imperious TV soap director in “Tootsie“), but dramatic ones as well. He reunited with Jane Fonda for “On Golden Pond,” this time as her sympathetic love interest; he also played a computer scientist (all business) in 1983’s “WarGames.” But crucially, I’ll always remember him from the 1984 computer game thriller “Cloak & Dagger,” where he plays both the distracted dad of Henry Thomas’s imaginative child protagonist and said child’s vision of his favorite spy character, Jack Flack. Given how often Coleman played heavies and oafs, it was nice to see him get to play the hero for once: the dashing man of action a son desires in a father figure and the disappointing but still-trying everyman he often gets. 

While his star waned in the 1990s, it did so only by degrees; like so many character actors before and since, Coleman simply took a couple of paces back and worked steadily in film and television for the ensuing decades. He had some strong rolls, too, not just as jerks. Sure, he played villains and heels in “Boardwalk Empire” and “Buffalo Bill,” but one of his final roles was a one-episode appearance as Kevin Costner’s dad on “Yellowstone” — finally playing the kind of cowboy the Texan actor could have leaned on his whole career, but who blissfully got to be so much more. 

The blessing and the curse of all great character actors is that, if you’re good enough at your job, your work becomes invisible. Uncelebrated. In many ways, that was Coleman: Whether before or after “9 to 5,” he was the kind of reliable presence you could slot into any number of gumshoes, executives, or government officials, and he’d nail it with little fanfare. But that was also the beauty of Coleman’s unassuming work–He made swinging from a garage door or playing a computer-game hero made manifest seem effortless. His presence was a comfort. You could be sure you were in good hands. And, dollars to donuts, you could be pretty sure he’d be a real jerk.