Snakkle Brings You 10 Things You Didn’t Know About John Lithgow
Many know him as the hilarious alien Dr. Dick Solomon from 3rd Rock from the Sun or the chilling Arthur Mitchell, a.k.a. Dexter’s “Trinity Killer,” but there is much more to this award-winning actor of stage and screen. In his autobiography Drama hitting shelves this week, Lithgow lets readers into his rich personal and professional history. By Elizabeth Perkins
1. As a child in Yellow Springs, Ohio, the young Lithgow had a babysitter named Coretta Scott—a young woman who would later marry Martin Luther King Jr.
2. Lithgow spent a night as a curtain puller for the famous French mime Marcel Marceau.
3. Lithgow’s father Arthur was a prolific theater producer and director who gave John some of his earliest roles—including some at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival. Now known as the Great Lakes Theater Festival, this theater group boasts another famous alum: Tom Hanks.
4. At Harvard, Lithgow’s classmates included the prolific and brilliant director Terrence Malick, as well as David Ansen, the lead film critic for Newsweek for more than 30 years.
5. Lithgow married Jean Taynton, six years his senior, at the age of 19. He cites his affair with actress Liv Ullmann during the run of Anna Christie as a contributing factor in their divorce.
6. Lithgow (very) briefly worked as a taxi driver in Manhattan before discovering that “nobody measuring six-foot-four could sit in the front seat of a New York City cab for a 10-hour stretch without crippling himself for life.”
7. While living in New York, Lithgow worked for radio station WBAI, dubbed “an anarchist’s circus” by The New York Times. The station received national attention (not all of it positive) for its scathing “memorial tribute” of J. Edgar Hoover on May 2, 1972.
8. Brian De Palma helped get Lithgow his first feature film role, recommending him to the director of Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues, and would hire Lithgow more than any other film director.
9. Lithgow was drafted for the Vietnam War while in London. He spent a week struggling to “induce in myself a feverish state of anxiety, depression, and near madness. And it worked.” After putting on a show for his physical and mental exams, Lithgow was classified a 4-F and would not be sent to war.
10. After his 1967 graduation from Harvard, Lithgow stayed in Cambridge to spend a summer with the Harvard Summer School Repertory Theatre for a production of White House Happening. Lithgow starred as Abraham Lincoln, and one of his costars was none other than fellow Harvard student Tommy Lee Jones.
September 27, 2011 at 5:37 pm, Sally K Witt said:
I have had so much respect and love for John Lithgow over the years. Good for him!