John Lahr was born on July 12, 1941 in Los Angeles, California, USA as John Henry Lahr. He is an actor and writer, known for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: 50 Years of Magic (1990), Because of the Wonderful Things It Does: The Legacy of Oz (2005) and Elaine Stritch at Liberty (2002). He has been married to Connie Booth since 2000.
[on who are his favorite playwrights] An impossible question. But, since the greatest show on earth is the show of human emotion, for complexity of character, psychological nuance and downright dramatic behaviour, it's only three: Anton Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, August Wilson.
2
I'm not a fan of science fiction - life on earth is mysterious and terrifying enough. I'm often drawn by tone and by the slant of the language. The way the sentences pop. A few well-angled sentences announce to me if this is a voice whose command I can trust or whose quirkiness intrigues. Style, after all, is metabolism. Even if it's non-fiction, the writing has to have a pulse, something I can feel beneath the facts.
3
[on the favorite of his own published works] Each book inevitably engineers some emotional transition in a writer's life, but given one I'd say my first book, 'Notes on a Cowardly Lion', which I finished the week my father died when I was twenty-six. In it, I mourned him and preserved him.
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Fact
1
Portrayed by Wallace Shawn in "Prick Up Your Ears" (1987).
2
His godfather was Jack Haley, the "Wizard of Oz" co-star of his father.
He constructed "Elaine Stritch at Liberty", performed in London at the Old Vic Theatre in 2002, and was nominated for a 2003 Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for Best Entertainment.