James Lipton
TV host and producer
JAMES LIPTON, who has died at 93, got the Hollywood greats to open up about their lives and art on his television show, Inside The Actors Studio.
An actor and producer turned drama school head, he began the show in 1994, with the idea that it would also serve as a class for his students at New York’s Actors Studio Drama School, where he was dean.
He often said his only requirement for a guest was whether they had something to teach his students. His first, Paul Newman, set a standard of stardom for those that would follow, including Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro, Glenn Close, Steven Spielberg and Barbra Streisand.
Lipton was known, and often parodied, for his highbrow and sometimes worshipful tone with his subjects, and for his intensive preparation, represented by a pile of blue note cards that held his meticulously researched questions. When Will Ferrell played Lipton on Saturday Night Live, the pile of cards was nearly a foot thick.
Many otherwise media-shy actors were willing to appear on Inside The Actors Studio because Lipton focused on their craft and not the usual celebrity chatter or project promotion.
He was not afraid to get personal, however, and his stunned interviewees often asked “How did you know that?” when he asked about something from their childhood or private life.
Julia Roberts asked Lipton if he had talked to her mother after one set of questions, and Sally Field in her first season appearance asked, “Have you been reading my diary? Talking to my shrink?”
Lipton’s own childhood was
made financially perilous by the divorce of his parents, the poet and journalist Lawrence Lipton and teacher Betty Weinberg.
“I always had to work, from the age of 13. When my father left, we had nothing,” he said in 2013. While he dabbled in acting as a youngster, he intended to pursue law to avoid the instability he had experienced.
He ultimately turned back to his original passion, the arts, but with an unusual detour – procuring Parisian women for clients after the Second World War. He was broke, he said, and planning to leave the city when a prostitute he knew suggested that he represent her and others.
“It was only a few years after the war. Paris was different then, still poor. Men couldn’t get jobs and, in the male chauvinist Paris of that time, the women couldn’t get work at all. It was perfectly respectable for them” to work at one of city’s bordellos, Lipton said.
Back home in the US, he studied acting with the famed teacher Stella Adler, as well as production and directing at New York University and the New School. His 1950s stage and screen credits included The Autumn Garden on Broadway and a stint as actor and then writer on the TV soap opera, The Guiding Light.
Lipton wrote the book and the lyrics for two Broadway musicals, Nowhere To Go But Up and Sherry!, and produced around two dozen TV specials including 12 with Bob Hope, and President Jimmy Carter’s inaugural gala in 1977 – the first to be televised.
He was married to Shirley Blanc and then to the actress Nina Foch, from 1954 until their divorce in 1958. In 1970 he married the model Kedakai Turner, who survives him.