It’s important to note that Sherman Hemsley played characters that have left indelible marks on the psyche of television viewers young and old. It us virtually impossible to turn on the television and not encounter one of the many roles that he played. Most notably George Jefferson.As a recurring character on “All in the Family,” Jefferson served as a kind of counterweight, if not exactly a counterpart, to Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker: an irascible, abrasive, acerbic, sharp-tongued, comic antihero, conservative by temperament, protective of his space and resistant to change. (George’s mistrust of white people was not quite the same as Archie’s fear of a black planet, but their jokes at the expense of each other’s race, and each other, did achieve a sort of ping-pong balance.) The spun-off series, “The Jeffersons,” which saw George and wife Louise (Isabel Sanford) moving “on up to the East Side/To a deluxe apartment in the sky,” ran from 1975 to 1985, logged 253 episodes and made the actor all but synonymous with his role.
There were five seasons of NBC’s “Amen” as a less than scrupulous church deacon and one of UPN’s “Goode Behavior” in which he played a paroled con man living with his son. He was also a voice on “Dinosaurs,” the ABC live-action puppet series. He stepped back into George Jefferson for cameos on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and, just last year, in Tyler Perry’s “House of Payne” and in commercials for the Gap, Old Navy and Denny’s. In the mid-1990s, there was a reunion, “The Real Live Jeffersons,” in which the main cast performed old scripts onstage.
Now view the tribute from Tyler Perry.
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