John Lithgow

John Lithgow was born on October 19, 1945, in Rochester, New York, to Sarah Jane (née Price), a retired actress, and Arthur Lithgow, a theatrical producer and director who ran McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey. The third of four children, Lithgow grew up alongside an older brother, David, an older sister, Robin, and a younger sister, Sarah Jane Bokaer. Because his father's work required frequent relocation, Lithgow spent his childhood in Yellow Springs, Ohio, his teenage years in Akron and Lakewood, Ohio, and later in Princeton, New Jersey. He graduated from Princeton High School in 1963 and went on to study history and English literature at Harvard College, where he lived in Adams House and later served on the Harvard Board of Overseers. A production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Utopia Limited during his undergraduate years helped solidify his decision to pursue acting. He studied under dramatist Robert Chapman, director of Harvard's Loeb Drama Center, and graduated magna cum laude with an A.B. in 1967, earning election to Phi Beta Kappa. A Fulbright Scholarship then took him to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Following his studies there, he served as director of the Arts and Literature Department at WBAI, the Pacifica radio station in New York City.

Lithgow made his Broadway debut in 1973 in David Storey's The Changing Room at the Morosco Theatre, playing English rugby player Kenny Kendal. The production ran from March 2 to August 18 for 192 performances, and Lithgow won both the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play and a Drama Desk Award for the role. The following year he returned to Broadway in the comedy My Fat Friend opposite Lynn Redgrave at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. He subsequently appeared in several productions at The Public Theatre and the Playhouse Theatre, including 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, A Memory of Two Mondays, and Secret Service, working alongside Meryl Streep and Tom Hulce. In 1985, he starred at the Martin Beck Theatre in Requiem for a Heavyweight, written by Rod Serling, playing washed-up boxer Harlan "Mountain" McClintock. The production ran only 11 performances, but Lithgow earned the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Play and a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Play. He received additional Tony nominations for M. Butterfly in 1988 and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels in 2005.

His second Tony Award came in 2002, when he won Best Actor in a Musical for Sweet Smell of Success, accompanied by the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Musical. Later Broadway credits include The Columnist in 2012, A Delicate Balance in 2014, and Hillary and Clinton in 2019. In 2018, he performed John Lithgow: Stories By Heart on Broadway. His stage work extended to the West End, where he portrayed Roald Dahl in Giant in 2024, a role that earned him the 2025 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor.

Lithgow's screen career has been equally wide-ranging. He received two consecutive Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor, first for playing transgender ex-football player Roberta Muldoon in The World According to Garp in 1982, then for his portrayal of lonely small-town banker Sam Burns in Terms of Endearment in 1983. Additional film credits include All That Jazz (1979), Blow Out (1981), Footloose (1984), The Manhattan Project (1986), Harry and the Hendersons (1987), A Civil Action (1998), Shrek (2001), Kinsey (2004), Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), Love Is Strange (2014), Interstellar (2014), Late Night (2019), Bombshell (2019), Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), and Conclave (2024).

On television, Lithgow starred as Dick Solomon in the NBC sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun from 1996 to 2001, winning three Primetime Emmy Awards for Best Actor in a Comedy Series. He earned a further Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series for portraying serial killer Arthur Mitchell in Dexter in 2009, and another for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for his depiction of Winston Churchill in the Netflix drama The Crown, in which he appeared from 2016 to 2019. He also starred in the HBO drama series Perry Mason beginning in 2020 and the FX thriller series The Old Man beginning in 2022. Across his career, Lithgow has accumulated seven Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, two Tony Awards, and a Laurence Olivier Award, along with nominations for two Academy Awards, a British Academy Film Award, four Grammy Awards, and four Screen Actors Guild Awards.