James Lipton

James Lipton, born Louis James Lipton on September 19, 1926, in Detroit, Michigan, was an American writer, actor, talk show host, and dean emeritus of the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University. He died on March 2, 2020. The only child of Betty Weinberg, a teacher and librarian, and Lawrence Lipton, a journalist and beat poet, Lipton grew up in Detroit after his parents divorced when he was six and his father left the family. Lawrence Lipton, a Polish Jewish emigrant from Łódź whose original surname was Lipschitz, worked as a graphic designer, a columnist for the Jewish Daily Forward, and a publicity director for a movie theater, and later became known for writing the Beat Generation chronicle The Holy Barbarians. Betty's parents were Russian Jews.

Financial hardship shaped Lipton's early years, and he began working at age thirteen. While still in high school, he worked as a newspaper copy boy for the Detroit Times and performed as an actor in the Catholic Theater of Detroit and in radio. Shortly after graduating from Central High School in Detroit, he portrayed Dan Reid, the Lone Ranger's nephew, on WXYZ Radio's The Lone Ranger. He attended Wayne State University for one year in the mid-1940s before enlisting in the United States Army Air Forces. He had originally intended to pursue a career in law, and after relocating to New York City he initially studied to become an attorney, turning to acting to finance his education. During the 1950s, Lipton spent approximately a year in Paris, where he worked in the regulated prostitution business, a period he later discussed publicly in interviews with Vanity Fair and on the Today show.

Lipton's Broadway career began in 1951, when he appeared in Lillian Hellman's play The Autumn Garden. He subsequently wrote the book and lyrics for the 1962 Broadway musical Nowhere to Go But Up, which tried out in Philadelphia at the Shubert Theatre, opening on October 6, 1962, before moving to New York's Winter Garden on November 10, 1962. The production received generally unfavorable reviews and closed on November 17, 1962, after nine performances, despite an attempt by 234 small investors to keep it running through a parade in front of the theater and a sought injunction, which the New York Supreme Court rejected in favor of the producer, Kermit Bloomgarden. Lipton also served as librettist and lyricist for the 1967 Broadway musical Sherry!, based on the Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman play The Man Who Came to Dinner, with music by his childhood friend Laurence Rosenthal. The score and orchestrations were lost for more than thirty years and the original cast was never recorded, though a 2003 studio cast recording featuring Nathan Lane, Bernadette Peters, Carol Burnett, Tommy Tune, and Mike Myers renewed interest in the show.

Beyond Broadway, Lipton built an extensive career in television and other media. From 1952 to 1962, he starred in the soap opera The Guiding Light, playing Dr. Dick Grant and eventually becoming the show's head writer. He also wrote for Another World, The Edge of Night, The Best of Everything, Return to Peyton Place, and Capitol. In 1953, he portrayed a shipping clerk turned gang member in Joseph Strick's crime drama The Big Break. He produced and wrote The Stars Salute Israel at 30, a 1978 ABC television special marking the thirtieth anniversary of the state of Israel, and produced roughly two dozen television specials, including twelve Bob Hope Birthday Specials, The Road to China for NBC, and the first televised presidential inaugural gala, for Jimmy Carter. In 1981, he published the novel Mirrors, about dancers' lives, which he later adapted as a made-for-television movie. His book An Exaltation of Larks, a collection of terms of venery both historical and invented by Lipton himself, was first published in 1968 and has remained in print through multiple revised editions, including a 1993 Penguin Books edition. His wife Kedakai Turner Lipton served as book and illustration designer for the ultimate edition of that work.

Lipton's most prominent later achievement was creating and hosting the Bravo cable television series Inside the Actors Studio, which debuted in 1994. Inspired by French television host Bernard Pivot, Lipton conceived the program as a non-credit class within the Actors Studio Drama School in which accomplished actors, directors, and writers were interviewed before an audience of acting students. The sessions were taped, edited, and broadcast publicly, eventually reaching viewers in 89 million homes across 125 countries. In 1994, Lipton arranged for the Actors Studio to partner with New York City's New School University to form the Actors Studio Drama School, a graduate-level degree-granting program; the school later moved to Pace University in 2006, where Lipton served as dean emeritus. He retired from Inside the Actors Studio in September 2018 after more than twenty-four years, with his final episode, an interview with Ted Danson, airing on January 11, 2018. In 2014, France awarded him the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his work on the show.

Lipton also appeared on screen in recurring and voice roles during his later career, including multiple episodes of Arrested Development between 2004 and 2019 as Warden Stefan Gentles, a voice role as the Director in the 2008 Disney animated film Bolt, and a role in the animated film Igor. He studied acting with Stella Adler for two and a half years, with Harold Clurman for four years, and with Robert Lewis for two years, and also pursued training in voice, modern dance, and classical ballet, eventually choreographing a ballet for the American Ballet Theatre.

Lipton was married three times. His first marriage, to Shirley Blanc, took place in 1947. From 1954 to 1959, he was married to actress Nina Foch. Beginning in 1970, he was married to model and real estate broker Kedakai Turner Lipton, who was known as the model depicted as Miss Scarlet on the cover of an edition of the board game Clue, and that marriage lasted until his death. Lipton was also a licensed pilot, certified in Airplane Single Engine Land planes, who began flying in 1980 and trained in a Cessna 152 and 172 at Van Nuys Airport. As of 2013, he had logged more than 1,000 hours of flight time and held membership in the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.