"Geniuses always think it's easier than we make it out to be." -- James Lipton
James Lipton (born September 19, 1926) is an America writer, poet, composer, actor and dean emeritus of Pace University's Actors Studio Drama School in New York City. He is the executive producer, writer and host of the Bravo cable television series, Inside the Actors Studio, which debuted in 1994. He is also a pilot and devoted member of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.
"And I thought if I don't pre-interview - first of all, we couldn't afford it - but the second thing was it would force me to do my own research, which takes two weeks.""And I thought, my God, there's an off chance that they will say something that's really worth preserving and there is one way to do that and I knew what it was because I come from television.""Because - Bobby Lewis said this once to us in class, the better you get, the less credit you'll get. Because the better you are, the more it looks like walking and talking and everybody thinks they can walk and talk.""Comedians don't laugh. They're too busy analyzing why it's funny or not.""Hackman is able to live in the moment which means there is nothing for him at that split second than what is occurring in the scene.""I criticize those critics. The reason being that they're doing one of the worst things that ever can be done to an actor, which is to say, Look, you do what we like you to do or else.""I did get Tom Hanks to say, Life is just a box of chocolates.""I had something called the back of the chair test. Where I sit, we don't sit like you and I do. I can see a sliver right behind them and they come out and they sit like this like god students and they don't touch the back of the chair.""I think that anybody's craft is fascinating. A taxi driver talking about taxi driving is going to be very, very interesting.""I thought we would have at most an audience of 5,000 devotees because I made the decision to stick to craft, not to gossip, not to be interested in any of the juicy stuff that they talk about on other shows, but stick to the question of craft.""I wanted when we began this to have a conversation, the kind that you're able to have, and the only way I knew how to do it was not to have a pre-interview.""I was dealing with craft, and that's the surprising thing, the number of people who have literally broken down on our stage, because when you're talking about the thing that is most important to someone, they're liable to feel something strong.""I was originally going to be a lawyer, and the only thing I remember from the art of cross-examination is - you can see this one coming up Sixth Avenue - never ask a question the answer to which you do not know.""I'll tell you why, I don't invite the ones I don't like.""If I were to ask you for example right now to go back with me and define those moments in your life that shaped you as a person and you began to reexamine them, something would happen.""It can be summed up in one sentence. Does this person have something to teach my students? No one has ever let us down.""Olivier was another case of a genius, who couldn't understand why anybody would have any trouble doing this, because for him it came so easily.""The definition of genius, really, should be that that person can do what the rest of us have to learn how to do.""The difference - the fundamental difference between theater acting and film acting is that film acting is disjunctive.""The foundation for film acting is stage acting.""The studio is meant to be always a place where, first of all, they can be out of spotlight, and second, where they could work with a peer group on parts that they might not have played otherwise.""They change. They're different. There are no two alike, that's the miracle of it. But if they have something to teach the students. You can see them writing during the show.""They will take a role that scares them over a role that doesn't. That's another thing I like about actors.""We are the only school in America, drama school in America that trains actors, writers and directors side by side for three years in a master's degree program, and we want them - to expose them to everything.""What I didn't know that by sticking to craft we would blow open some doors that I never saw opened before.""When it began I wrote this passionate letter to people I knew, studio members, of course, and other people with whom we have worked over the years and I said come and teach our students."
Lipton was born in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Betty (née Weinberg), a teacher, and journalist Lawrence Lipton. Noted as the author of the popular Beat Generation chronicle, The Holy Barbarians, Lawrence Lipton was a graphic designer, a columnist for the Jewish Daily Forward and a publicity director for a movie theater.
A 1944 graduate of Central High School, Lipton portrayed Dan Reid on WXYZ-Radio's The Lone Ranger. Moving to New York, he initially studied to be a lawyer, and turned to acting only to finance his education. He wrote for several soap operas, Another World, The Edge of Night, Guiding Light, Return to Peyton Place and Capitol, as well as acting for over ten years on Guiding Light. In 1951, he appeared in the Broadway play The Autumn Garden by Lillian Hellman. He portrayed a shipping clerk turned gang member in Joseph Strick's 1953 film, The Big Break, a crime drama.
Lipton was the book writer and lyricist for the short-lived 1967 Broadway musical Sherry!, based on the Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman play The Man Who Came to Dinner. The score and orchestrations were lost for over 30 years, and the original cast was never recorded. In 2003, a studio cast recording (with Nathan Lane, Bernadette Peters, Carol Burnett, Tommy Tune, Michael Myers and others) renewed interest in the show.
In 1968, his book, An Exaltation of Larks, was first published, and has been in print and revised several times since then, including a 1993 Penguin books edition. The book is a collection of "terms of venery," both real and created by Lipton himself. The dust jacket biography for the first edition of Exaltation claimed his activities included fencing, swimming, and equestrian pursuits and that he had written two Broadway productions. He speaks French fluently.
In 1983, Lipton published his novel, Mirrors, about dancers' lives. He later wrote and produced it as a TV movie. In television, Lipton has produced some two dozen specials including: twelve Bob Hope Birthday Special; The Road to China, an NBC entertainment special produced in China; and the first televised presidential inaugural gala (for Jimmy Carter).
Inside the Actors Studio
In the early 1990s, Lipton was inspired by Bernard Pivot, and sought to create a three year educational program for actors that would be a distillation of what he had learned in the twelve years of his own intensive studies. In 1994, he arranged for the Actors Studio...the home base of "method acting" in the USA for some sixty years now...to join with New York City's New School University and form the Actors Studio Drama School, a formal degree-granting program at the graduate level.
Lipton created a project within the Actors Studio drama school: a non-credit class called Inside the Actors Studio (1994), where successful and accomplished actors, directors and writers would be interviewed and would answer questions from acting students. These sessions are also taped and broadcast on television for the general public to see. The episodes are viewed in 89,000,000 homes throughout 125 countries. Lipton himself hosts the show and conducts the main interview.
During an interview with the writer, Daniel Simone, when asked if he had anticipated the sudden success, Mr. Lipton's eyes widened, and his deep trained voice boomed, "Not in my wildest imagination." Then he supplemented, "It was a joint arduous effort involving many people. At a point and time, I had three lives. I was the dean of the Actors Studio, the writer of the series, its host and executive producer. I maintained a preposterous 16-hour schedule."
Personal life
Between 1954 and 1959, Lipton was married to actress Nina Foch. He has been married to Kedakai Turner, a model and real estate broker, since 1970.
Lipton, as the host of Inside the Actor's Studio, has been parodied on various sketch comedy shows, the first being Mr. Show in a portrayal by David Cross. The scenes showed Lipton washing guests' feet and overreacting to the performances of spoiled, dimwitted celebrities. In one show, Lipton grilled Garrison Keillor so mercilessly that Keillor had to be sedated, which initiated a long-standing blood feud. Cross was even more direct and scathing about Lipton during a bit in his standup act during the mid-1990s. According to DVD commentaries, this caused awkward moments when Lipton guest-starred on Arrested Development, a series in which Cross starred, and the two were pitted opposite each other in several scenes.
Will Ferrell portrayed Lipton in a series of Saturday Night Live sketches, exaggerating his quiet intensity and obsequious style of interviewing famous actors. Most of the "actors" interviewed by Ferrell's Lipton are "Z" list celebrities (portrayed by an SNL regular or a guest host) who are humorously, excessively praised for the most banal film or television performances. Some of these interviewees include Drew Barrymore, played by Kate Hudson, Dustin Diamond of Saved by the Bell and Charles Nelson Reilly, Tobey Maguire and Alec Baldwin respectively. Lipton himself likes Ferrell's parody and told on several occasions how it is his favorite impression.
On Chappelle's Show, Lipton's show was parodied as Inside the Chappelle Studio. In a later edition of Inside the Actor's Studio, where Dave Chappelle himself would be the guest star, Lipton asked Chappelle "where are my fucking royalties?", at which point Chappelle peeled off two hundred dollar bills and handed them to Lipton. They would later engage in a rather peculiar dance-off . Lipton was also parodied on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, where show host Michael J. Nelson lost his mind and believed he was Lipton hosting Inside the Actors Studio. He asked a series of inane interview questions to Crow T. Robot, mistaking him for Ray Liotta, until he was snapped back to reality by the use of a "clown hammer".
Richard Christy of the Howard Stern Show has a parody show called Inside the Porn Actors Studio which began on May 15, 2006 featuring porn actress Hillary Scott. The show airs periodically on Sirius Satellite Radio.
Lipton played himself on a 2002 episode of The Simpsons, "The Sweetest Apu." Rainier Wolfcastle was the featured guest opposite Lipton, but the interview ended badly when an in-character (as McBain) Wolfcastle pulled out a gun and shot Lipton ("It was a pleasure to eat your lead, good sir!" he proclaims before expiring.)
Lipton was interviewed in an episode of the Da Ali G Show titled "Art" on March 14, 2003. At the end of the show, Lipton performed a couple of lines of a self-written rap.
Lipton was portrayed by both Will Sasso and Paul Vogt on the Fox comedy sketch-show MADtv.
Lipton was portrayed in The Untold Story interviewing Stewie and after laughing asks "And what is your favorite curse word" after Stewie said a curse.
In 2007, Lipton appeared in a television ad for Geico Insurance.
Lipton is also featured as a LEGO character on X-Entertainment's yearly Advent Calendar feature.
Mr. Lipton was also parodied in the animated television show American Dad! in the episode When a Stan Loves a Woman, during a dinner scene with Stan and his then-fiancee, Joanna, in the form of the waiter at the restaurant they were eating in.
In the episode "Swan Song" on Gilmore Girls, Rory is showing Jess her copy of The Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton and says that he is "the father of the guy that does those Actor’s Studio interviews on TV," to which Jess responds, "It’s weird that a beatniky guy would have a conservative son like that"
Lipton made numerous appearances on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. In one of his more memorable appearances, he re-enacted the incident on the set of Terminator Salvation which involved Christian Bale berating a crew member for distracting him.
