Arthur Lithgow

Arthur Washington Lithgow III (September 9, 1915 – March 24, 2004) was a Dominican-American actor and director. He helped pioneer the regional theater movement in the United States and founded two Shakespeare festivals. He was the father of the American film and theater actor John Lithgow.

Early life

Lithgow was born in Puerto Plata, the Dominican Republic, the son of Ina Berenice (née Robinson), an American nurse, and Arthur Washington Lithgow II, an American-Dominican entrepreneur born to Ellen Prentiss Peirce, American, and Washington G. Lithgow, a Dominican of American descent, who was a vice consul and vice commercial agent in the country. He first appeared onstage in December 1920 at age 5 as a cherub in a Christmas pageant at the Unitarian Church in Melrose, Massachusetts.

Career He appeared in student productions at Antioch College, where he founded the Antioch Summer Theater in 1935 and where he received his BA in 1938. He made his New York City debut in November 1938, as a soldier in Jacques Deval's anti-Nazi drama, Lorelei.

A nomad all his life, Lithgow was in Rochester, New York near the end of World War II, where he appeared in amateur productions such as the glib cockney scoundrel in an amateur production of the English comic melodrama Ladies in Retirement, produced by the Rochester Community Players.

Lithgow received his MA from Cornell University on playwriting in 1948 and served as assistant professor of dramatics at Antioch from 1947 to 1956.

He first began directing Shakespeare at Antioch College in 1952, when he became the Founder and Artistic Director of the Antioch Shakespeare Festival, or "Shakespeare under the Stars," as it came to be known. Within a period of six years, this festival produced all of the works of Shakespeare, bringing the attention and praise of even the Queen of the United Kingdom. In 1958, he moved to Northern Ohio as Executive Director of Stan Hywet Hall in Akron, Ohio.

He appeared on Broadway in A Cure for Matrimony, Steel and the musical Lorelei (which starred Carol Channing and was based on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes).

In 1963, he became executive director of the McCarter Theatre at Princeton University, a position he held until 1972, when he and his family relocated to Boston, where he was a visiting professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He served as administrative director of the Brattleboro Center for the Performing Arts in Brattleboro, Vermont. In 1976, he became a Visiting Associate Professor of the Theatre Arts at the University of South Florida at Tampa. While there he began directing the Alice People Theatre.

Personal life Lithgow married actress Sarah Jane Price in 1939. They had four children, including John, who is an Emmy- and Tony-winning actor.

Death Lithgow died of heart failure at age 88 in Amherst, Massachusetts.