John Lithgow spent five decades playing men you can’t trust. Now he’s Dumbledore

John Lithgow

Photo: Rubenstein / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 19, 1945 Rochester, New York, United States
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Interstellar, Shrek, Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Awards	3 Tony Award · Laurence Olivier · 3 Emmy · Golden Globe

John Lithgow has spent most of his working life persuading audiences to trust men who do not deserve it. His Arthur Mitchell in Dexter was a deacon and doting father who killed on a schedule. His Lord Farquaad in Shrek was a tyrant with immaculate manners, and his Roald Dahl in Giant charms a room full of publishers until his contempt curdles it. Now the actor with the most reassuring voice in American drama has chosen, as what he calls probably his last major role, the most trusted grown-up in children’s fiction: Albus Dumbledore in HBO’s Harry Potter. He did not expect the part to arrive with a question attached.

Theatre was the family trade. His father, Arthur Lithgow, was a producer and director who went on to run the McCarter Theatre in Princeton; his mother, Sarah Jane Price, had been an actress before she retired. The family followed his father’s jobs from Yellow Springs to Akron to Princeton. He went to Harvard to study history and English literature, and it was a student staging of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Utopia, Limited that tipped him toward acting. A Fulbright scholarship then took him to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

Lithgow, who was born in Rochester, New York, on 19 October 1945, won a Tony Award with his very first Broadway role, as a rugby player in David Storey’s The Changing Room in 1973. Film was slower. Brian De Palma used him in Obsession and Blow Out, and then came two consecutive Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor: for Roberta Muldoon, the transgender former football player in The World According to Garp (1982), and for Sam Burns, the lonely banker who becomes Debra Winger’s lover in Terms of Endearment (1983). Neither turned into a win, and he has not been nominated by the Academy since.

For the rest of the decade he could be almost anyone. He was the preacher who bans dancing in Footloose (1984), the unravelling passenger in Twilight Zone: The Movie, the father who takes a Sasquatch home in Harry and the Hendersons (1987). In 1988 he returned to Broadway as the French diplomat in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. Hollywood, though, kept hiring him to frighten people. The villains of Ricochet, Raising Cain and Cliffhanger (1993), where he hunts Sylvester Stallone across the Rockies, made menace the default setting of his screen career.

The escape route was comedy. As Dick Solomon, the pompous alien commander posing as a physics professor in 3rd Rock from the Sun, he won three Emmys between 1996 and 1999, with his son Ian playing one of his students. Shrek (2001) then folded both instincts into one voice. He recorded Lord Farquaad over years of delays and later admitted he had taken the film for something like a Saturday morning cartoon. A year later he won his second Tony, playing the poisonous columnist J. J. Hunsecker in the musical Sweet Smell of Success.

Television gave the menace back to him with interest. His Trinity Killer in the fourth season of Dexter won him an Emmy and a Golden Globe, and his Winston Churchill in the first season of Netflix’s The Crown (2016), built from archive footage and a fat suit, brought another Emmy and a Screen Actors Guild award for an American playing the most English of prime ministers. In between came the tenderest work of his film career, Love Is Strange (2014), as one half of an ageing gay couple opposite Alfred Molina.

The Dumbledore casting is where the admired version of Lithgow met resistance. When he confirmed the role in February 2025, the objections centred on J.K. Rowling’s views on transgender women, and a close friend, the mother of a trans child, sent him a link to a published open letter urging him to walk away. His first answer, to The Times in April 2025, sharpened the anger: he wondered why it was “a factor at all” and called it odd that nobody had complained when he agreed to play Dahl, a man whose antisemitism is the subject of Giant. The position sat awkwardly with his own record, from the trans character who earned him his first Oscar nomination to Jimpa, Sophie Hyde’s film in which he plays a gay, HIV-positive grandfather to a non-binary teenager. By March 2026 he was telling The New York Times that he had considered quitting, that he disagrees with Rowling, and that the books are “clearly on the side of the angels, against intolerance and bigotry”. He also accepted that the subject would come up “in every interview I will ever do for the rest of my life”. He stayed.

The late screen work has kept its edge. He played the Fox News chief Roger Ailes in Bombshell (2019), a prosecutor in Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) and the scheming Cardinal Tremblay in Edward Berger’s Conclave (2024). Jimpa, with Olivia Colman, premiered at Sundance in January 2025 and reached American cinemas in early 2026.

The biggest late triumph came on stage. Mark Rosenblatt’s Giant, directed by Nicholas Hytner, opened at the Royal Court in September 2024, transferred to the Harold Pinter Theatre and won him the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in 2025. On Broadway it ran at the Music Box Theatre from March to June 2026, and on 7 June he won the Tony for Best Leading Actor in a Play, fifty-three years after his first. At 80 he became the oldest man to win a competitive acting Tony. The production, filmed live at the Harold Pinter Theatre, reaches cinemas in 18 countries from 19 November 2026.

He has kept a second career as a children’s author, with books such as The Remarkable Farkle McBride. His first marriage, to the teacher Jean Taynton in 1966, produced his son Ian and ended in divorce in 1980, after an affair with Liv Ullmann. He has since been married to Mary Yeager, a UCLA history professor, with whom he has a son and a daughter.

The first season of HBO’s series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, premieres on HBO and HBO Max on 25 December 2026, with Janet McTeer as McGonagall, Nick Frost as Hagrid and Paapa Essiedu as Snape. Lithgow has described it as “an eight-year commitment” and “a very good winding-down role”. Readers of the books will remember that Dumbledore is also a man who keeps secrets from the people who trust him most. Lithgow has played that man for fifty years; this time the audience is meant to love him for it.