The TV host who went inside actors’ minds
Nobody seemed to care more about what actors had to say than James Lipton. As the longtime host of the Bravo show Inside the Actors Studio, Lipton interviewed Hollywood stars with an ardor that endeared him to devoted fans even as it drew eye-rolling from critics who found him pompous and obsequious. His effusive style invited parody, most notably from Will Ferrell, who lampooned Lipton in Saturday Night Live skits. Yet with an approach that sidestepped gossip for a somber focus on the craft of acting, Lipton often succeeded in getting his famous guests to reveal intimate details. Spike Lee and Ben Kingsley both cried in the interview chair, while Jack Lemmon confessed to being an alcoholic. “When you’re talking about the thing that is most important to someone,” said Lipton, “they’re liable to feel something strong.”
Born in Detroit, Lipton was raised largely by his mother, a teacher and librarian, said The Washington Post. His father was a journalist and Beat poet who “abandoned the family for an itinerant life.” Lipton developed an early interest in acting; for a period, he played the Lone Ranger’s nephew on radio. But “hav
James Lipton
ing associated the arts with his delinquent father,” he decided to become a lawyer, said The New York Times. After a stint in the Air Force, Lipton studied at Columbia University and, “in need of an income, sought out acting jobs.” Five years later, he quit the law and embraced the acting life.
Lipton took small-time TV roles and in 1953 made his feature debut “as a wiseguy in the ultralowbudget The Big Break,” said The Hollywood Reporter. After finishing a film in Greece, he traveled to France and “stumbled into one of his more unusual jobs”: recruiting patrons for a livesex performer. “We did a roaring business,” he said. “It was a great time of my life.” Returning home to act, Lipton found more success as a writer and spent years scripting soap operas, TV movies, and a pair of Broadway musicals. In the 1990s, he helped create the Actors Studio Drama School in Manhattan and conceived a series of interviews that would serve as master classes. He cut a deal with Bravo to air Inside the Actors Studio, little guessing it would bring him the fame his own acting never generated. “I had no dark hopes for it,” he said of the show. “I just had no way of guessing these things would happen.”