Actor Ed Asner, left, and the character he voices in the film, Carl Fredricksen, arrive at the premiere.

AP / DAN STEINBERG

LOS ANGELES Ed Asner lives in a modest house on a tree-lined street in the east San Fernando Valley. His two friendly cats seem completely at home amid the packed bookcases and collection of tribal masks from around the world. On a living room table, a pair of Asner’s seven Emmy Awards compete for attention with photos of the TV actor posing with the likes of Jimmy Carter, Muhammad Ali and Fidel Castro.

There’s also a framed cutout collage of Asner and Carl Fredricksen, the grumpy old cartoon man that the 79-year-old actor provides the voice for in the new Pixar feature Up, which this year became the first animated movie to open the Cannes Film Festival. Dialogue balloons from each character’s mouth profanely discuss the finer points of the festival and its nearby nude beaches.

In Up, Asner voices the role of Carl, who becomes something of a senior-citizen action hero after flying his house by helium balloons to a remote, wonder-filled South American plateau.

“I love carrying the banner for the old folks!” Asner says. “Thank God I’m here, and I can lift it.”

Asner has been working steadily, both in front of the camera and in the voice recording booth, since his signature series Lou Grant ended its network run in 1982. He won two of his drama Emmys for playing the hard-nosed newspaper editor in that show, and is the only person also to have won the award (well, three of them, actually) for portraying the same character in a comedy, in an earlier incarnation of Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Asner’s gruff yet warm voice has been a staple on Saturday morning cartoon shows for decades. But Pixar, the pioneering digital outfit whose unbroken string of hits include the Toy Story movies, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles and last summer’s WALL-E, is a whole other level of animation achievement.

As Asner tells it, getting the lead voice in Up was hardly a sure thing.

“These two guys, (Up directors) Pete Docter and Bob Petersen, came over to see this one-man show, a staged reading I was doing in San Francisco,” he recalls. “I was this old Holocaust survivor who was having dementia. Evidently, that didn’t deter them from wanting me for the role.”

And while many actors consider voicing animated films a walk in the park, Asner found his bimonthly recording sessions over at Pixar’s corporate sister Disney’s studios as demanding as anything he’s ever done.

“No stone is unturned, they’re thinking all the time,” he says of the filmmakers. “They niggled me to death on different readings, but it was a wonderful experiment and I love being tested. And I like to think I measured up to any exactitudes that they tried to get away with.”

Asner could not be more impressed by the final product, either –– especially because little old Carl turns out to be one small element of the overall package.

“On paper, it sounds like a kid and animals and nee nee nee nee neeyah,” he says. “And then you see the film and you see how marvelous and majestic it is; you can’t say it, the magic comes from their having done it. For a year and a half I’ve been telling people I’m doing a Pixar film and they’ve said, ‘Big shot!’ But then I go in and look at all of that other stuff in the movie and I’m this little bit. It’s fantastic.”

A self-described “sucker for the spoken word,” the Kansas-raised Asner first got into acting via his voice, performing on closed-circuit radio in high school and college, where he also made his stage bow. His dedication to the craft has been mostly life-consuming. He was president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1981 to ’85, and no, he doesn’t like the current contract deal they’re about to vote on –– and there has been time for two marriages, several kids and a good deal of political activism.

Heavily involved in labor and racial causes for much of his life, the leftist actor isn’t exactly thrilled with what the Obama administration has done so far.

“I certainly voted for him,” Asner says. “Mr. Obama is a very clever fellow, and he may achieve change by his cleverness, by never confronting something head-on but doing end runs around all the time.”