On this date in 1945, actor John Arthur Lithgow was born in Rochester, N.Y., to Sarah Jane (née Price) and Arthur Lithgow III. His mother was an actress and his father was a theatrical producer and property manager. The family moved a lot due to his father’s work in theater production, including 10 years in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where for a time Coretta Scott, a college student and future wife of Martin Luther King Jr., babysat for the four Lithgow siblings.
“I’m not a religious person,” Lithgow explained later. “I grew up in eight different places. There was never even the opportunity to become part of a religious community, even if my family were so inclined, which they weren’t.” (Showbiz Cheatsheet, July 20, 2022)
The Lithgows lived in Akron, Ohio, in the early 1960s when Arthur was the first manager of the estate built for the Seiberling family, founders of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. The huge home contained 64,500 square feet. Lithgow graduated from high school in Princeton, N.J. and enrolled at Harvard University, where he earned a B.A. in 1967 and then won a Fulbright Scholarship to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
After a stint at WBAI, the Pacifica radio station in New York City, he made his film debut in “Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues,” followed by playing a pivotal role in 1976 in Brian De Palma’s “Obsession” opposite Cliff Robertson and Genevieve Bujold. He had debuted on Broadway in “The Changing Room” (1972), which earned him his first Best Featured Actor Tony Award.
It was the fist among numerous plaudits he would garner, including six Emmys, two Golden Globes, two Tonys and nominations for two Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award and four Grammys. He appeared in Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical movie “All That Jazz” in 1979. His second Tony was for the musical “Sweet Smell of Success” in 2002.
While Lithgow’s 6-foot-4 frame made many small-screen appearances, his role as Dick Solomon in the TV sitcom “3rd Rock from the Sun” (1996–2001) is perhaps best known. It brought him three Primetime Emmys for Best Actor in a Comedy Series. He received further Primetime Emmys for Showtime’s “Dexter” (Season 4) and as Winston Churchill in the Netflix drama “The Crown” (2016–2019).
A small sampling of his dozens of other film roles — too numerous to mention them all — includes “The World According to Garp” (1982), “Terms of Endearment” and “Twilight Zone: The Movie” (1983), “Footloose” (1984), “The Manhattan Project” (1986), “Memphis Belle” (1990), “The Pelican Brief” (1993), “Shrek” (2001), “Kinsey” (2004), “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (2011), “Love Is Strange” (2014), “Pet Sematary” (2019), “Killers of the Flower Moon” (2023) and “Conclave” (2024), in which he and Stanley Tucci portrayed Catholic cardinals.
Lithgow received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2001 and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2005 and the American Philosophical Society in 2019. He married Jean Taynton, a teacher, in 1966. They had a son Ian in 1972 and divorced in 1980. He married UCLA history professor Mary Yeager in 1981. They have a son Nathan and a daughter Phoebe.
Lithgow has done extensive work for children, including several books and three music albums. He took groups to performances of Brahms’ “Hungarian Dances” ballet and Tchaikovsky‘s “The Nutcracker” when he conducted the orchestra while children performed.
He presided in 2006 at the marriage of his goddaughter Nell Freudenberger in East Hampton, N.Y., as an officiant of Rose Ministries, which offers online ordinations regardless of religion, sexuality or race.
PHOTO: Lithgow in 2009 at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, Calif.; photo by Shutterstock/s_bukley.
