Sherman Hemsley

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Sherman Alexander Hemsley (born February 1, 1938) is an American actor, most famous for his role as George Jefferson on the CBS television series All in the Family and The Jeffersons and as Deacon Ernest Frye on Amen. He also played Earl Sinclair's horrifying boss, a Triceratops named B.P. Richfield on the Jim Henson sitcom, Dinosaurs.

Career

Early life

Hemsley was born and raised in South Philadelphia by his mother, who was a factory worker. He dropped out of school and joined the Air Force, where he stayed for four years. When he left the Air Force, he moved back to Philadelphia where he worked for the Post Office during the day while attending acting school at night. He then moved to New York, continuing to work for the Post Office during the day while working as an actor at night. He starred as the character Gitlow in the early 1970s Broadway play, Purlie.

Work with Norman Lear

While Hemsley was on Broadway with Purlie, Lear called him in 1971 to play the role of George Jefferson on his burgeoning new sitcom, All in the Family. Hemsley was reluctant to leave his role in Purlie, but Lear told him that he would hold the role open for him. Hemsley joined the cast two years later. The characters of Hemsley and co-star Isabel Sanford were secondary on All in the Family, but were given their own spin-off series, The Jeffersons, less than two years after Hemsley made his debut on the show. Such was Hemsley's and Sanford's compatibility and credibility as a married couple that no one seemed to notice or care that in real life Sanford was twenty years older than Hemsley. The Jeffersons proved to be one of Lear's most successful shows, enjoying a run of 11 seasons before its cancellation in 1985.

1980s and 1990s

Though Hemsley was largely typecast as George Jefferson, he continued to work steadily after the show's cancellation. He teamed up with the show's original cast members when The Jeffersons moved to Broadway for a brief period.

Hemsley joined the cast of NBC's Amen in 1986 as Deacon Ernest Frye, an unscrupulous church elder much like his Jefferson character. The show enjoyed a run of five seasons, ending in 1991. Hemsley then was a voice actor in the ABC live action puppet series Dinosaurs, where he played Bradley P. Richfield, Earl's sadistic boss. The show ran for four seasons, ending in 1994.

Hemsley has largely retired from television acting, although he and Isabel Sanford appeared together in the late 90's and in the early 2000s, reprising their roles in guest spots on television programs such as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, commercials for The Gap, Old Navy and Denny's, and dry cleaning conventions. He and Sanford also made a cameo appearance in the film Sprung. They continued to work together on occasion until Sanford began having health problems leading to her death in 2004.

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Sherman Hemsley, the man who brought George Jefferson to vivid life, has died at age 74. The accomplished stage actor achieved his widest fame in a role he raised to comic greatness: George Jefferson, the egotistical, strutting centerpiece of The Jeffersons.

Hemsley took a part that could have been clownish and exaggerated — George Jefferson, the braying entrepeneur striving to, as the show’s theme song said, “move on up” — and made George a vital, three-dimensional character, and an important advance in the depiction of black characters in sitcoms. George’s ego and selfishness were often brought into line by his wife, Isabel Sanford’s Louise Jefferson (George’s beloved “Weezy”), but the force of the character derived from the tremendous ambition, frustration, and anger George felt toward the world.

You can credit producer Norman Lear for helping to conceive the character, first in All in the Family and then as a spin-off in The Jeffersons, but it was clearly Hemsley’s performance that fueled its power. Hemsley had come up through the theater, in straight dramas as well as musicals (he came to George Jefferson initially fresh from a run in the raucous, Ossie Davis-derived Broadway musical Purlie), and Jefferson brought a rhythmic musicality in the way George moved onscreen. His erect posture conveyed George’s pride, his perpetually affronted exp

ression was a mask against the injustices, correctly perceived or imagined, by George; his harsh voice was the sound of a man who would not be denied his place in the world. Watching George Jefferson was to witness a man comfortable in his own skin — and that that skin was black was significant. From Hemsley’s performance, you could build an entire philosophy of the man he played. As a black man of his generation, George was as likely to have taken his civil rights cues from Malcolm X as from Martin Luther King, Jr. And while his business acumen placed him squarely in the capitalist tradition, George was a Black Panther-inspired figure of action, emboldened to make his opinions heard, his actions felt in the world around him.

The Jeffersons aired for a decade, 1975-85, and Hemsley’s performance embodied George’s move from the working-class to the middle-class as the owner of a chain of dry-cleaning businesses. George’s pride, his radar for any trace of racial exploitation, his ease at dismissing someone who’d offended or condescended to him as “honky” — these were all elements that could easily have put off mass America. Instead, because of Hemsley’s skill, charm, and energy, they became the elements that endeared the character to the country.

Hemsley went on to other roles. He was a rascal church deacon in the sitcom Amen; he provided the voice for an imperious character in the puppet sitcom Dinosaurs. These were, in a sense, variations on George Jefferson, who will live and rant and remain lovable and admirable forever.

[Zanny]

RIP Sherman. AWESOME comedic actor.