John Lithgow in the news (reviews and interview)…We host him Oct 6 at Live Talks Los Angeles
We host John Lithgow on October 6 at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. Ticket info here. He’ll be in conversation with Geoff Boucher of the Los Angeles Times. Excerpts from review and interviews with Lithgow follow…
From the Wall Street Journal:
Why did you decide to write a memoir?
In fact, there was another stage, the first thing that happened was the solo show. The experience was so intense and so important to me and it was all involved with the telling of a fantastically funny story. That’s the ironic thing. Reading P.G. Wodehouse to my father. So I did the solo show, which was very autobiographical, and it was only then at the suggestion of other people, that I had the impulse to write the memoir. I had never had the courage to write that frankly about myself and communicate it to people, and it really reached them, and it really moved them, and I thought well, yes, I think I can do this. That was three years ago, and there have been many moments in the intervening time when I thought nope, I can’t do it. [laughs]
From the New York Times:
John Lithgow is probably best known for playing oddballs and weirdos: a psychotic physicist in “Buckaroo Banzai,” an extraterrestrial college professor on the long-running sitcom “3rd Rock From the Sun” and most recently the creepy serial killer Arthur Mitchell in the Showtime series “Dexter.” With his big, almost hulking frame and long, quizzical-looking face, Mr. Lithgow on screen or onstage effortlessly manages to seem like a panic-stricken creature imprisoned in the wrong body.
But in person Mr. Lithgow, who has an equally long résumé of conventional characters and a sideline in making recordings for children, is disappointingly normal. His new memoir, “Drama: An Actor’s Education,” which comes out Tuesday, recounts in graceful, considered prose a life that after a few wrong turns is now happier and more well adjusted than most.