James Lipton, host of ‘Inside the Actors Studio,’ dies at 93

James Lipton, who also wrote words and music to Broadway shows, scripted soap operas and oversaw Bob Hope specials and other star-studded spectacles but became best known to a national audience as the probing but deferential host of the Bravo TV show "Inside the Actors Studio," died March 2 at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.

The cause was bladder cancer, said his wife Kedakai Mercedes Lipton.

As a young writer and actor brimming with theatrical ambition in the 1950s, James Lipton struggled for years to make his mark. He contributed scripts to soap operas - sometimes three shows simultaneously - and his two efforts to breakthrough into mainstream musical theater as a lyricist/librettist in the 1960s were embarrassing flops.

He returned to TV, where he gradually found his pace as the impresasio behind Hope specials as well as grand-scale, made-for-TV galas to honor the arts and American history. He was head writer from 1982 to 1987 of the TV soap opera "Capitol," set in the Washington, D.C., area, and continued to pour out television films, one based on his novel "Mirrors," about ballet hopefuls in the competitive world of New York dance.

"I'm not that fond of everything that's been written or filmed about dance," Lipton told the New York Times. "They're essentially variations on '42d Street.' The star is hurt, the understudy goes on and a new star is born. More interesting to me are all those dancers to whom that never happens."

After decades working in genres that rarely attract critical esteem, Lipton received a board seat at the Actors Studio workshop. It was vaunted and highly selective organization, established in 1947 by Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis and Cheryl Crawford, to train generations of actors, directors and writers and had been dominated almost from the start by artistic director Lee Strasberg until his death in 1982.

But the Actors Studio finances were in grave condition when Lipton was recruited. He proposed a drama school to attract fresh tuition funding, and it proved a near-instant success from the moment he took over as dean in 1993. The next year, he created "Inside the Actors Studio" to attract an even bigger audience for the workshop's approach to teaching and help spur marketing.

From Paul Newman to Robin Williams to Steven Spielberg, Lipton invited hundreds of actors, directors and other show-business personalties on. the program, quizzing them before a live audience of eager pupils. Beyond asking guests to recount their biography, often in exhaustive fashion, Lipton used his deep knowledge of stagecraft and show business to plumb their thoughts on their philosophies toward their trades and share anecdotes about the real world often guided by luck and circumstances beyond their control.

In style, Lipton could be cerebral as well as sycophantic. He approached his work not as a journalist but as a serious-minded fan, never attempted to paint his guests in an uncomfortable light or ask them uncomfortable questions of a personal nature. He used large blue index cards, based on his voluminous research into the lives of his interviewees, to guide the conversation.

"The show is, in the end, about the interior life of those who love the art form, about the struggle that leaves them lonely, introspective, unsure," New York Times journalist Chris Hedges wrote. "Mr. Lipton's encyclopedic knowledge and unconditional acceptance - he lets his guests edit things they do not like from the tape - combine to create intimate and often moving portraits of lives in progress."

The show was ripe for lampoon by Will Ferrell on "Saturday Night Live."

Mr. Lipton, who acknowledged and embraced his caricature as fawning and pompous, told Hedges that he wanted his program to be "an antidote to what is normally done with these people. I want to create an environment where people are willing to talk about the craft, not about themselves as people but as artists." "It almost always works," Hedges commented.

One of Ferrell's most well-known and beloved routines from his stint on Saturday Night Live was his parody of Lipton.

"I love it, I love it," Lipton said. "It's flattering."

Lipton said the two had actually become friends, and Ferrell had dropped by Inside the Actors Studio and he, in turn, had appeared in Ferrell's 2005 film "Bewitched."

"We're good friends - and I think he's got me cold, the rat," Lipton said.

During the same CNN interview, Lipton was asked one of the classic Actors Studio questions he asks his quests: "What would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?" Lipton responded, "You see, Jim? You were wrong. I exist. But, you may come in, anyway."

In 2011 Hollywood star Bradley Cooper became the first of the drama school's master of fine arts degree alumni to be interviewed on the show.

James Lipton was born in Detroit on Sept. 19, 1926. His mother was a teacher and librarian. His father, who had immigrated from Poland as a child, abandoned the family for an itinerant living as a fiction writer and educator who once led "jazz canto" workshops on the West Coast and attracted an enthusiasic following among "Beat" authors as Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Raised by his mother and maternal grandparents, the younger Lipton showed a precocious interest in books and tried to write novels by the time he was 12. He worked odd jobs to support his family while also developing an interest in theater and radio performance. For a period, he played a child nephew of the Lone Ranger on Detroit radio station WXYZ.

After attending Wayne State University and brief military service, he found himself discharged in Paris and found steady if seedy employment working as a procurer of prostitutes. He returned to the United States, settled in New York and began taking classes in art and theater. He immersed himself in a cultural mileau that included Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler, a protege of Russian theater director and actor Constantin Stanislavski, and Adler's husband Harold Clurman, a noted director.

To subsidize further classes in voice, modern dance and choreography, he took acting jobs in low-budget films and had a recurring role as a doctor on the soap opera "The Guiding Light." He began contributing scripts and was soon named head writer of the show in addition to writing for two other soaps, "The Edge of Night" and "Another World."

Mr. Lipton made his Broadway debut as an actor in Lillian Hellman's 1951 drama "The Autumn Garden" and teamed with composer Sol Berkowitz ("The Unsinkable Molly Brown") on a Prohibition Era musical called "Nowhere to Go but Up," directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Tom Bosley. The show, for which Mr. Lipton wrote the book and lyrics, shuttered after a week amid dreadful reviews.

The title, however, was slightly more prophetic. Mr. Lipton's next musical, "Sherry!," with a score by composer Laurence Rosenthal and based on George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's hit comedy "The Man Who Came to Dinner," squeaked out a run that lasted two months. (But a 2004 all-star recording of the score - featuring Tommy Tune, Bernadette Peters, Nathan Lane, Carol Burnett, Mike Myers, among others - were greeted with more enthusiasm.

His first marriage, to the actress Nina Foch, ended in divorce in 1959. In 1970, he married Kedakai Turner, a former model who became a real estate executive with whom he shared a townhouse on Manhattan’s East Side and a property in Southampton, New York. She is his only immediate survivor.