I watched Inside the Actors Studio for many years. Lipton was always so organized with his questions on index cards. What started as a instructional class taught all of us about the craft of acting.
RIP Mr Lipton
He clearly had a love for the arts and the people who acted and sang and wrote and directed.
And that came through when he spoke to people.
My favorite curse word? Damnit!
I saw him several times on Conan O’Brien when his show was in NY.
The show wrote some silly Sketches and Lipton was always willing to do them. He didn’t mind poking fun at his serious, academic image.
Oh, I enjoyed him on the Actors Studio show.
RIP Sir.
He was good on Arrested Development as well. It was really funny because David Cross had said some less-than-kind things about James Lipton’s show and then Lipton was cast as the Warden on Arrested Development. They were able to move past it to make the show.
And it was hilarious.
93 though? Jeez I didn’t think he was even in his 80’s. Not that I paid too much attention this past decade or so.
This is someone who really requires an IMDb link, which is a must read. Amazing.
He wrote for a bunch of soap operas!
Not much acting work. A while back there was a thread on finding links between widely separated shows. I did one chain from The Goldbergs to The Goldbergs starting with his appearance on an episode in 1954.
(Here’s a near minimum chain: The Goldbergs -> James Lipton -> Arrested Development -> Jeff Garlin -> The Goldbergs. I think I went via ITAS and Drew Barrymore.)
Somebody at people.com didn’t check their URL, or left it as “/james-lipton-dies-inside-the-actors-studio/” as a poor attempt at a haha.
I swear his hair just kept its color the whole time. It is possible he dyed it, but it looked really natural and was through his beard. It helped him maintain his youthful look.
Dude didn’t age the last 25 years.
I got the mental image of him meeting God, who’s sitting in Lipton’s chair on his set, and God says “Your body is going to fertilize an orchard. Now… (whips out an index card) if you could be any kind of tree…?”
ETA: God of course looks like Will Ferrell playing Lipton.
The New York Times ended its obituary with a few of Lipton’s answers to Bernard Pivot’s questionnaire:
(my emphasis) I have to admit that Cross’s Lipton bit was the first thing I thought of on hearing the news of Lipton’s passing. Cross did an imitation of Lipton being, well, quite dramatic, in discussing his staff: ‘______, who brings me my tea—you are God’s own warrior…’
Condolences to all of James Lipton’s family and friends.
Always enjoyed his interviews. Are they archived anywhere with free public access?
That was always the worst thing on the show. Not the questions themselves or Lipton asking them, the actors pretending to be hearing them for the first time and acting like their answers were spontaneous.
I really enjoyed his show for a while, but as his interview subjects kept getting younger and younger, he also became “the guy who thinks every movie was good” and it was frustrating that he’d only want to talk about popular crowd-pleasing movies instead of diving deep into some more obscure (but excellent) films on the actors’ CVs. And the less said about the absolute train wreck of his show with the cast of THE SIMPSONS, the better.
But it was nice that he never took himself too seriously via his fun cameos, as well as the incredibly funny parody that Will Ferrell did of him (which was both riotously over-the-top and yet completely dead on). And he brought enormous visibility to discussions of the craft of acting, which I think many lay people either took for granted or misunderstood.
RIP.
If the word “cringe” was an actual person