James Lipton

James Lipton
James Lipton, April 2007
Born	September 19, 1926 (1926-09-19) Detroit, Michigan, U.S.
Occupation	Poet, talk show host, writer, teacher, actor, producer
Years active	1951–present
Spouse	Nina Foch (1954–1959) Kedakai Turner (1970–present)
Parents	Lawrence Lipton Betty Weinberg

James R. Lipton (born September 19, 1926) is an American writer, poet, composer, actor and dean emeritus of the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University 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 member of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.

Early life

James R. 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.

Career

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, with music by his childhood friend Laurence Rosenthal. 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 Specials; 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 over sixty years - 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. After ending its contact with the New School, the Actor's Studio established The Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University in 2006.

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 million homes throughout 125 countries. Lipton himself hosts the show and conducts the main interview.

During an interview with writer Daniel Simone, when asked if he had anticipated the sudden success, Lipton responded, "Not in my wildest imagination. 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."

Lipton's tenure on Inside the Actor's Studio has tended to attract good reviews, if not always for flattering reasons, as evidenced by the following by AA Gill of the Sunday Times: "The real joy, the guilty pleasure of this show, however, isn’t the guests or the clips. It’s the presenter, who just is the celebrity’s David Brent. A man whose self-image parted company with its reality a long time ago. James Lipton is a deathless luvvie-licker. He looks like a gay undertaker or the wine waiter at a Ukrainian restaurant. His CV is an inspired comic creation. For real. He wrote for and acted in daytime soap operas, and was the author of a short-lived Broadway musical, Sherry!. Savour that exclamation mark. He is the author of a book, An Exaltation of Larks, a collection of real and invented collective nouns. Best, he is peerlessly servile while at the same time managing to be creepily familiar. The questions are coated liberally in baby oil before being reverentially offered as congratulatory suppositories to the prone thespians. There is a regular quiz that is supposed to be quirkily revealing. What is your favourite word? Which noise do you hate most? I can’t get enough of this stuff. It is the perfect antidote to celebrity."

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.

See also

• Bernard Pivot

External links

• Bravo biography
• James Lipton at the Internet Movie Database

Preceded by Irna Phillips & William J. Bell	Head Writer of Another World March 1965–October 1965	Succeeded by Agnes Nixon
Preceded by Agnes Nixon	Head Writer of Guiding Light 1966–1968	Succeeded by Irna Phillips
Preceded by Ira Avery & Stanley H. Silverman	Head Writer of The Doctors (with) Eileen and Robert Mason Pollock Early 1970s–1974	Succeeded by Margaret DePriest
Preceded by Robert Soderberg & Edith Sommer	Head Writer of Guiding Light 1973–1975	Succeeded by Bridget and Jerome Dobson
Preceded by Henry Slesar	Head Writer of Capitol 1986–1987	Succeeded by none