John Lithgow

A free press is a critical protection for we the people. The NPR network proudly upholds your First Amendment rights with independent journalism that answers only to you. Your support keeps our reporters on the ground holding power to account, and the power to decide what's next for public media is yours. Give at donate.npr.org. This is Fresh Air.

I'm Dave Davies. Our guest today, John Lithgow, is an actor you can probably recall from a half dozen roles off the top of your head. But the remarkable thing about his nearly two hundred performances on stage, screen, and television is that age eighty he's still going strong. You can see him playing an intelligence agent with Jeff Bridges in the FX action series The Old Man. He plays the character Dumbledore in a new HBO Harry Potter series that premieres in December, and he's starring now on Broadway, doing eight performances a week in the play Giant, about a troubling side to renowned children's author Rald Dahl.

Among Lithgow's many career honors are Oscar nominations for his roles in the film The World according to Garp in terms of endearment, and six primetime Emmy Awards for playing Winston Churchill in The Crown, a serial killer in the series Dexter, and an alien visiting Earth in the sitcom Third Rock from the Sun. He's been nominated for six Tony Awards and won twice, including once for his very first appearance on Broadway. Lithgoe has also written several children's books, a memoir titled Drama, an Actor's Education, and the Dumptee trilogy, three books of satirical poems inspired by the current occupant of the White House. Lithgow's current play, Giant, is set in 1983, when Rold Dahl ignited a controversy by writing an article with views that were widely seen as antisemitic. In the play, Dahl and his fiancee are at home in discussion with the British and an American representative of Dahl's publishers, who want him to say something to soften his message and diffuse the controversy.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (46 minutes, 7,225 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.