John Lithgow

John Arthur Lithgow studied at Harvard and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art before his 1972 Broadway debut in The Changing Room won him his first Tony Award. Two Academy Award nominations followed in quick succession - for a transgender ex-football player in The World According to Garp (1982) and a lonely banker in Terms of Endearment (1983) - but the width of his career defied any single lane. He won three Emmy Awards playing the preening alien Dick Solomon on 3rd Rock from the Sun from 1996 to 2001, then another for the chilling Arthur Mitchell on Dexter in 2009. A second Tony came in 2002 for Sweet Smell of Success; further Emmys arrived for his Winston Churchill in The Crown. Between sitcoms and serial killers he voiced Lord Farquaad in Shrek, played the minister in Footloose, and appeared in Interstellar, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Conclave. In 2024 he won the Laurence Olivier Award for playing Roald Dahl in Giant on the West End, still stretching at seventy-eight.