Richard Thomas

Richard Earl Thomas, born June 13, 1951, in Manhattan, is an American actor whose career spans stage, television, and film across more than six decades. The son of Barbara Fallis and Richard S. Thomas, both dancers with the New York City Ballet who also owned the New York School of Ballet, Thomas grew up in Manhattan and attended the Allen-Stevenson School before moving on to the McBurney School. He later enrolled at Columbia College, where he initially majored in Chinese before transferring to the English department, ultimately leaving during his junior year to pursue his acting career full-time in Los Angeles.

Thomas made his Broadway debut in 1958 at age seven in Sunrise at Campobello, launching a stage career that would continue through 2026 and include productions such as The Balusters, Our Town, The Great Society, The Little Foxes, and An Enemy of the People. After more than a decade away from Broadway, he returned in 1980 as a replacement in Lanford Wilson's Fifth of July. Subsequent Broadway appearances included Michael Frayn's Democracy in 2004, Richard Greenberg's A Naked Girl on the Appian Way in 2005, and David Mamet's Race in 2009 and 2010, the latter directed by Mamet himself alongside James Spader, David Alan Grier, and Kerry Washington. His 2017 appearance in the Broadway revival of The Little Foxes earned him a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play, as well as a 2016 Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play.

Beyond Broadway, Thomas built an extensive record in regional and off-Broadway theater. At the Hartford Stage in Connecticut, he appeared in Hamlet in 1987, Peer Gynt in 1989, Richard III in 1994, and Tiny Alice in 1996. He performed the title role in a Shakespeare Theater production of Richard II in Washington, D.C., in 1993, and joined Nathan Lane at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1990 for Terrence McNally's The Lisbon Traviata. In 2001, he appeared in London's West End in Yasmina Reza's Art with Judd Hirsch, and in 2005 he performed in The Public Theater's Central Park production of As You Like It and in the Primary Stages off-Broadway production of Terrence McNally's The Stendhal Syndrome. He starred in Timon of Athens at the New York Public Theater in early 2011. Beginning in April 2022, Thomas took on the role of Atticus Finch in the national Broadway tour of To Kill a Mockingbird, a production that ran through 2024. In 2025, he starred as Mark Twain in a national touring revival of Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain Tonight.

Television audiences first encountered Thomas in the late 1950s and 1960s through appearances in the Hallmark Hall of Fame NBC presentation of Ibsen's A Doll's House in 1959, the soap opera The Edge of Night as Ben Schultz in 1961, and As the World Turns as Tom Hughes from 1966 to 1967. His career-defining role came in 1972 when he began portraying John-Boy Walton, an aspiring writer, in the CBS drama series The Waltons, based on the life of writer Earl Hamner, Jr. Thomas had first played the character in the 1971 television film The Homecoming: A Christmas Story, which led to the commissioning of the series. He appeared in 122 episodes before departing in March 1977, and won an Emmy Award for Best Actor in a Dramatic Series in 1973 for the role. He also received an additional Emmy nomination and two Golden Globe Award nominations for his work on the series, and returned to the role in several television movies during the 1990s, including A Walton Thanksgiving Reunion in 1993.

Thomas's television work extended well beyond The Waltons. He played Private Henry Fleming in the 1974 NBC television film The Red Badge of Courage and Paul Bäumer in the 1979 CBS adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. He portrayed the adult Bill Denbrough in the 1990 television miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's It, and took on the title role in the 1983 biopic Living Proof: The Hank Williams Jr. Story. He appeared in Roots: The Next Generations in 1979 and starred in the Hallmark Channel film The Christmas Box in 1995 alongside Maureen O'Hara and Annette O'Toole. From 2013 onward, he played Special Agent Frank Gaad in the FX spy drama The Americans. In January 2022, he portrayed Nathan Davis, Wendy Byrde's estranged father, in three episodes of the fourth season of Netflix's Ozark, and in February 2021 he appeared as Bodie Lord in the Amazon thriller series Tell Me Your Secrets.

Thomas's film career includes early roles in the auto racing drama Winning in 1969 with Paul Newman and the coming-of-age film Last Summer, also from 1969, alongside Bruce Davison, Barbara Hershey, and Catherine Burns. In 1971, he appeared in the psychological thriller The Todd Killings and starred in Red Sky at Morning, which reunited him with Burns. He also appeared in Battle Beyond the Stars in 1980. In addition to his on-screen work, Thomas has narrated more than 340 audiobooks for Audible as of January 2023. Originally from New York, New York, he married Alma Gonzales in 1975; the couple had a son in 1976 and triplet daughters in 1981.