Lear traced Hemsley to San Francisco, where he was appearing onstage in the musical “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope,” and offered him the role of George Jefferson.Ī year after “The Jeffersons” left the air, Hemsley returned to television in “Amen,” a sitcom set in a black Baptist church in Philadelphia. “The cocky energy of the guy was totally in sync with the offstage image we had created of George,” Lear later said. Hemsley’s big break came a year later when he was cast in the Broadway musical “Purlie.” When Norman Lear was looking for an actor to play Archie Bunker’s neighbor, he remembered seeing Hemsley in that show. In one - a double bill of “Old Judge Mose Is Dead” and “Moon on a Rainbow Shawl” (1969) –he drew praise from the New York Times, which called him “an actor whose instinct for the comic line and the comic gesture, even the comic lift of an eyelash, is wholly natural and just about perfect.” He also appeared in Off Broadway productions. He joined the Negro Ensemble Company, studied with renowned actor and director Lloyd Richards (later dean of the Yale School of Drama) and performed with Vinette Carroll’s Urban Arts Corps. In 1967, encouraged by actor and director Robert Hooks, Hemsley moved to New York to pursue an acting career. He returned to Philadelphia after his discharge and, while working at the post office, attended Philadelphia’s Academy of Dramatic Arts in the evening. Bok Technical High School in the 10th grade to join the Air Force and was stationed in Asia after the Korean War. Sherman Alexander Hemsley was born in Philadelphia on Feb. And the reclusive Hemsley, who tended to avoid the Hollywood spotlight, established himself as one of television’s most popular stars, if also one of the least accessible. “The Jeffersons” was a hit until it left the air in 1985. Each week, his wife or their irreverent maid, Florence (played by Marla Gibbs), would step up to scuttle his wrongheaded schemes or deflate his delusions of grandeur.įlorence: It just occurred to me why your hair keeps falling out. At the same time, however, he was vain, snobbish and bigoted (“honky” was one of his favorite epithets directed at whites) and flaunted his self-regard like a badge. High-strung and irrepressible, George Jefferson quickly became one of America’s most popular television characters, a high-energy, combative black man who backed down to no one - something that had rarely been seen on television. “The Jeffersons” made its debut in January 1975 in the opening episode, George, the owner of a successful cleaning business his wife, whom he called Weezy (played by Isabel Sanford, who was 20 years Hemsley’s senior) and their son, Lionel (Mike Evans), leave Queens and, in the words of the show’s memorable theme song, are “movin’ on up” to Manhattan’s fashionable Upper East Side - to “a deluxe apartment in the sky.” The show was an immediate success, finishing fourth in the 1975 Nielsen ratings.
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The character of George Jefferson proved so popular that a spinoff series was developed. Mel Stewart was seen as George’s brother, Henry, until Hemsley joined the cast.) (In reality, Hemsley was unavailable until then.
Although George’s wife, Louise, was frequently seen, George himself was mentioned but did not appear until 1973: He was said to be unwilling to set foot in a white family’s house. George was conceived as a black version of Archie, as distrustful of white people as Archie was of black people (and almost everyone else). The Jeffersons were introduced as Archie Bunker’s Queens neighbors on “All in the Family” in 1971. His death was confirmed by his agent, Todd Frank. Sherman Hemsley, the bantamweight comic actor who portrayed the scrappy, nouveau riche George Jefferson on the hit CBS sitcom “The Jeffersons,” died Tuesday, July 24, at his home in El Paso, Texas.
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