| Sam Waterston |
Sam Waterston displaying gifts from fans |
| Birth name |
Samuel Atkinson Waterston |
| Born |
November 15 1940 (1940--) (age 66)
Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A. |
| Occupation |
actor |
| Years active |
1967—present |
| Spouse(s) |
Barbara Rutledge-Johns Waterston (1964—1969)
Lynn Louisa Woodruff (1976—present) |
Samuel Atkinson Waterston (born November 15 1940) is
an Academy Award-nominated American actor noted
particularly for his portrayal of Jack McCoy on the long-running NBC television series Law &
Order. He has also appeared in many feature films.
Biography
Early life
Waterston, one of four siblings, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father, George Chychele Waterston, was an immigrant from Leith, Scotland and was a semanticist and
language teacher. His mother, Alice Tucker Atkinson, was an American Mayflower descendant and
worked as a landscape painter.[1][2] Waterston attended both the Brooks School,
a boarding school in North Andover, Massachusetts, and the Groton School. He entered Yale University on a scholarship in
1958 and graduated with a BA in 1962. After graduating from Yale, he attended the
Clinton Playhouse for several months. Waterston also attended the Sorbonne in
Paris and the American Actors Workshop.
Career
Waterston made his film debut in Fitzwilly in 1967. Waterston starred with
Katharine Hepburn in a 1973 TV movie adaptation of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. The film
also featured Michael Moriarty. Coincidentally, Waterston replaced Moriarty as the
Executive Assistant District Attorney many years later on Law & Order. Other films include Savages (1972), The Great Gatsby (1974),
Journey Into Fear (1975), Capricorn
One (1978), Heaven's Gate and Hopscotch (1980), The Killing Fields
(1984, nominated Academy Award for Best Actor), Mindwalk (1990), Serial Mom (1994) and Woody Allen's Interiors (1978), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986, cameo), and Crimes
and Misdemeanors (1989). Waterston is a six-time Emmy Award nominee as well as a
winner of the Golden Globe and Screen
Actors Guild Awards.
Aside from Law & Order, he has played other television roles including D.A. Forrest Bedford in I'll Fly Away. He also had a starring role in an episode segment on the TV series
Amazing Stories called "Mirror Mirror". He is also on the Advisory Committee for the Lincoln
Bicentennial, celebrating Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday. Waterston has portrayed
Lincoln on stage and screen (The Civil War, Gore Vidal's Lincoln, Abe Lincoln in Illinois on Broadway, voiced Lincoln in an exhibit at the National
Constitution Center in Philadelphia, and delivered Lincoln's Cooper
Union speech May 5, 2004, which is available from C-SPAN.)
Waterston has appeared in episodes of four different series with Richard Belzer:
Law & Order, Homicide: Life
on the Street, Law & Order: Special Victims
Unit and Law & Order: Trial by Jury. He also made a
popular cameo appearance on an episode of Saturday Night Live as himself, extolling the virtues of Old Glory Insurance, meant to protect the user from robot attacks.[3]
Waterston lent his voice to the popular animated television series Family Guy where
he played Dr. Kaplan, the psychiatrist Brian Griffin consulted during his mid-life crisis in the episode "Brian
in Love". His character, Dr. Kaplan, was modeled to look like Waterston. He was Dr. Kaplan's voice in the episode
"Road to Rhode Island", but he is not credited in any other episode in which the
character appears. Waterston also narrated NBC's documentary, The Great Race, the story of
the famous 4 x 10-kilometer cross-country relay at the 1994 Winter Olympics in
Lillehammer, Norway, which Italy won over the host nation. The special aired during NBC's coverage of the 2006
Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, on February
18, the day before the 2006 relay took place, which was also won by Italy, though in dominant fashion, unlike the 1994
event. He added partial narration to PBS's documentary, Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, serving
as the voice of Thomas Jefferson. He also appeared in the first episode of ABC's Masters of Science Fiction
playing an amnesiac in the episode A Clean Escape.
Waterston appeared on the 5,100th edition of Jeopardy!, on November 10, 2006, with Kathryn Erbe of
Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Christopher Meloni of Law & Order:
Special Victims Unit. Waterston finished second to Meloni, and received a $25,000 prize, which he donated to
Refugees International and Oceana.
Waterston is regularly featured in television advertisements for Toronto-Dominion
Bank's TD Ameritrade (formerly TD
Waterhouse, the bank's investment arm). He replaced former Law & Order castmate Steven Hill as TD's spokesman. Also, he has lent his voice to an ad for The
Nation.
Personal life
An active humanitarian, Waterston donates considerable time to organizations such as
Refugees International, Meals on Wheels,
The United Way, and The Episcopal Actors' Guild of America. Waterston, a
practicing Episcopalian,[4] narrated the 1999 biographical documentary of Episcopal civil rights martyr Jonathan Myrick Daniels, Here Am I, Send
Me.
A political independent, he is a spokesman for the Unity08 movement, which seeks to run a non or bi-partisan presidential ticket in the 2008
U.S Presidential Election.[5]
In 2002, Waterston and fellow Law & Order castmate Jerry Orbach were honored as "Living Landmarks" by the New York Landmarks
Conservancy.
Waterston is a long-time friend and fan of the Mark Morris Dance Group and hosted the
television presentation of Mozart Dances on PBS's Live From Lincoln Center, August 16, 2007.
Filmography
References
External links
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
