John Lithgow discusses playing Roald Dahl, appearing on Bake Off - and sings with Ruthie

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0:48That's why over 200 ,000 happy customers have made the switch. Upgrade your space today. Visit washablesofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life. That's washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. You are listening to Ruthie's Table 4 in partnership with Montclair. Neither John Lithgow nor I remember how we met. I think it was about 20 years ago. He thinks more. I think it was a roommate from Harvard who introduced us. He thinks a friend from New York. In fact, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that John is living in London. performing in Giant to rave reviews, playing Roald Dahl, and he and his wife Mary Yeager's house is around the corner from mine.

1:37On Sunday nights, the one day he's not on stage, they've come to supper. Our friends love them, my children love them, and I love them. John has played an alien, a cardinal, a serial killer, a prime minister, presidents, and though I've seen Giant three times, the role I know best is John as a friend. He is quite simply the nicest man I know. John and I share a belief in the joy of song and right now in this world we are looking everywhere for joy. His albums for children, singing in the bathtub, Farkle and Friends and the sunny side of the street are beautiful. I've been listening to him sing, Everybody Eats When They Come to My House.

2:22Very relevant. And my favorite, Getting to Know You. Both particularly relevant today. Right now, we're at the River Cafe on Father's Day to talk about acting and food, theater and food, film and food, family and food. Who cares how we met? We're together now. Oh, my God. Should we sing Getting to Know You? Getting to Know You. Getting to know all about you Getting to like you Getting to hope you like me That's how I used to hope it Haven't you noticed Suddenly I'm bright and breezy Because of all the beautiful and new Things I'm learning about you Day by day Now, when have you begun an interview like that?

3:25No, we haven't. I will confess that Richard E. Grant was here about a few months ago, and in the middle of it we started talking about My Fair Lady, and he played Henry Higgins. And so he said to me, what's your favorite song from My Fair Lady? I said, that is so easy because for me, I've grown accustomed to her face. And so he sang it. Do you know that? I did play that part. Did you play Henry Higgins? Once at the Hollywood Bowl. There was a full production put together for one evening. That's cute. And because I had grown up listening to the original cast album, as you clearly did. I did, yeah.

4:05I performed it with 10 days rehearsal, fully costumed, with the entire Los Angeles Philharmonic up on stage with us. And, oh, my God, Roger Daltrey played Doolittle. Did he? And Paxton Whitehead played Pickering. Rosemary Harris played Mrs. Higgins. Who played Eliza, do you remember? That was Melissa Erika. Oh, that was her. And I think we performed it for about 19 ,000 people at the Hollywood Bowl. And, you know, the magnified, the amplified voices on stage, they sort of hit like two seconds later way up at the back. Wow, crazy. And so you would tell a joke and the laughter would sort of roll up the hill.

4:56It was the most amazing experience. But did you love it? Oh, it was fantastic. Why don't you do it again? We were talking. I always wished that they would ask me to do it again for a run somewhere because it is the perfect musical. That for me, well, you'll have all different ones, but for me, My Fair Lady and Guys and Dolls. I love the music from Guys and Dolls. But we were talking about it the other day with Greta and Noah and actually with Richard and we were saying, could you do My Fair Lady now? Because it is pretty misogynist. And they were saying, yes, why not have a play about a man who doesn't understand and his own.

5:32It was equally controversially back in those days. But Higgins is a George Bernard Shaw avatar and a very kind of challenging and dangerous wit. I mean, it's kind of like playing Roald Dahl. You're startled by his savage wit. In what way? Well, it's a savage wit. It's a willingness to be cruel. Why can't a woman be more like a man? Yeah, exactly. I mean, you have to consider the source. It's wonderful to play a part that's all id. That's how I always felt about playing Dick Solomon on Third Rock from the Sun. Just nothing but impulse, completely unedited, because he knew nothing about the proprieties of being a human being.

6:23And now Roald Dahl. Yeah, it's very much the same. For three hours a night you are Roald Dahl. Watching you in the theater and being in the theater and having seen Giant, how does food enter your workday? When you're thinking about, if you're doing a matinee, do you start thinking about it in the morning? Are you going to have a breakfast or a lunch? What's the food schedule? It's a catastrophe. Doing a play, especially a really demanding play like Giant, it's thrown everything off. I never know when to have a good meal. Because if you wait too late, you've got too full a stomach. When the show is over and you come home, You don't want to eat too much then because you've got to sleep.

7:04It's very confusing. I'm counting on Sundays. That's why I keep gravitating toward the River Cafe. We're going to go and have lunch very soon. But would you eat? So like tomorrow, you're on a performance tomorrow night. Do you think you'll eat? Oh, God, I've got a horrendous day tomorrow. Don't remind me. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I have entered into a sort of Venn diagram period of my schedule where I'm running giant but doing prep work for Harry Potter. And tomorrow I have wardrobe fittings, and Tuesday I have hair and makeup, and this is Dumbledore we're talking about. And then I have to race back into town to do the show both nights.

7:44Then I have two on Wednesday. So I don't know when I'm going to eat. We better go have a good lunch. And when you're filming, do you think about movies? Movies are a luxury because they feed you well midday every day and you're frequently on location where you're eating. God, I did two months in Rome on Conclave. I wanted to hear about that because I've heard from Stanley and from Rafe. Oh, my God, yes, Stanley. You and Stanley did a tour of Tuscany, did you? Well, I went by myself around Tuscany but following Rafe's itinerary. He laid out where I should go. And, I mean, doing a film in Rome with Stanley Tucci and Isabella Rossellini and Ralph Fiennes, it was just fantastic.

8:33Tell me about it. What would you do then? Would you film and then go out to eat in the evening? Yeah, we ate at night in Trastevere. We're in an amazing, funky hotel across the Tiber from Trastevere. Eating and drinking at the end of a long day of working was great. And then had to get up the next morning. Much better than doing theater. Well, maybe you should think about that, you know, when you choose what films you're going to do. I once asked, one of the first big roles I played in movies was Obsession for Brian De Palma, where we shot in Florence in New Orleans. And I asked him, Brian, did you pick the cities before you made up the story?

9:13And he said yes. He did, yeah. Where do you want to be on location? Yeah, where do you want to be? Yeah, exactly. Well, you're going to be in London, which is going to be great. So when do you start doing the Harry Potter? We have a break. Right as soon as this ends. There's no break. You just go from one to the other. But I don't expect to be working as hard on that as I do on this. What does it feel like at the end of it? It's really exhausting. It's exhausting. I mean, you're elated by it, but it's completely exhausting. Have you ever done a play where you had to eat on stage? Oh, yes. Tell me about it.

9:45Oh, actually, I made a great discovery when I played King Lear in New York at the Public Theater, the scene where he sort of crashes his daughter's castle with his entire troop of knights. The director wanted me to sit down and eat, eat hearty after the hunt. And the prop man came up with this ingenious device for eating on stage. He made these chunks of watermelon covered with food coloring. looked exactly like a big slab of beef. And I would just pop gigantic square inches of watermelon into my mouth, and they disappear instantly. So not only can you eat and speak Shakespeare at the same time, but you're also hydrating.

10:39Watermelon is really good for you. And that's what we do in Giant. Don't tell anybody. I won't tell. You just told 10 ,000 people. They serve us salad niçoise. Oswald, that's thinly sliced watermelon. That was it. Yeah, that's good. And I can always get everything down my gullet on cue. There's about 10 moments when I'm munching, munching, munching, and then speak. I remember that, yeah. And it's all gone straight down just in time. I think it wasn't Kerry Mulligan. It was someone, maybe it was Kerry, that had to cook and eat something, made a pasta. I think it was maybe for a Harold Pinter play that was...

11:17Oh, no, it was David Hare. David Hare. I think it was Skylight. Was it Skylight? Oh, yeah. Where they cook a pasta on stage. Yeah. And she described having to actually cook it and then eat it. It's always wonderful when that happens on stage. Yeah. It's a little spice of reality. When you smell it, you have it. But I'm basically cheating up there on stage. Yeah, okay. We can cut that from this. We can tell them. Nobody's going to like it. Oh, go ahead and share it. I just like to think about the early days. Your father was born in the Dominican Republic, is that right? So what was that like? Well, it's a kind of curiosity of his history and mine.

11:57He was descended from two or three generations of Scotsmen, I suppose. Lithgow is a Scottish name, who lived in the Dominican Republic. His father and his grandfather were both vice consuls. And he was born in Santo Domingo and grew up in Porta Plata, but only grew up until he was four. And then he went straight to Boston, and that's my real... So your grandparents? Yes, whom I never knew. I knew my grandmother, but not my grandfather. He died when my dad was four. So it's really just a curiosity of my biography. Did your mother cook food that maybe came from there, or did she bring any Caribbean food?

12:46No, not a thing. I would say the food in my household was very much Boston seafood. That was my father's absolute favorite food, New England, lobsters and clams and scallops. And my mother, she was from Rochester. I see. I and my siblings had a crazy upbringing because my father was a regional theater artistic director, and we lived in about eight different places. So what was his job? He directed? He created and ran Shakespeare festivals in Ohio. I mean, another curiosity of my biography. It's what has turned me into this peculiar hybrid between an American and an Englishman. And my mother just kept the house, kept the family together as we moved from place to place and just was a very reliable kind of fanny farmer cook.

13:47I remember her cooking very well. I remember one of our, my real hometown up until I was about 12 years old was Yellow Springs, Ohio. We lived in a house on Dayton Street, and it was full of fruit trees and an entire line of rhubarb along one side of the lawn. I don't know whether they planted it or inherited it. Certainly they inherited all the fruit trees, but there was peach trees, cherry trees, apple trees, and she used to make the most incredible rhubarb pies. What was it like? Do you remember? All rhubarb, none of this strawberry rhubarb stuff. No, no, yeah. And just one of my favorite things growing up.

14:35Would you go pick the rhubarb or would she go? Yeah, pick the rhubarb for her. And it was a, I just remember family meals. Did you all sit down at night? Yeah. How many brothers and sisters? I have two sisters and a brother. So that's quite a lot of work. There were four of you. I'm number three, yeah. She was cooking for four. Yeah, and they were, let's see, about a 15-year span between the first and the last. And what about your dad? Was he then home much, or was he always at? Yeah, he was always home, but always in the theater. Yeah. That's how I remember him. And he had a crazy career that veered between the theater profession and the teaching profession.

15:21I see. It was just... What did he do in church? If you're in the theater, you have a crazy life. Sometimes you're employed, sometimes you're not. Sometimes you have to choose other work. Sometimes it's going great and sometimes it's a catastrophe. He started this idea of doing, because that's very different from being an actor, to have a business or a career. Setting up a theater, doing Shakespeare, going from town to town, finding the theater. Well, it came out, most of his theaters were university connect. He did a great Shakespeare festival that lasted eight years at Antioch College. Oh, Antioch.

16:02Yeah. Oh, yeah, I know. And he taught there. Oh, I see. That's it, yeah. And he acted and directed. He's explained Antioch College because it's quite a very different place. Very funky in the middle of Ohio. It's certainly the most lefty, radical place in Ohio, and it hasn't changed at all. Maybe in the States. It always had an image of being very liberal. But tremendously exciting place. and that was our hometown. A lot of my friends were professor's children and a lot of them were on the blacklist. You know, it was a great, this was in the early 1950s, McCarthy era and it was a badge of honor to have your father a blacklisted professor.

16:40My dad was in that world as well. Do you know how Howard Koch was? Howard Koch was one of the writers who wrote Casablanca and we lived in a small town upstate New York, Woodstock and we were on the street and he was literally our next-door neighbor. Actually, that's one of the reasons I came to London, is that Howard, I wanted to take time off, and Howard, because so many writers at the time who were blacklisted came to England, didn't they? Yeah, Carl Foreman. Yeah, Carl Rice maybe too. Yeah. I think there were quite a lot of people. Ring Lardner Jr. It was quite a gang. Yeah, quite a gang. So did you know that being in this world of theater, of your father setting up theaters, was this an influence of being an actor?

17:20Well, I was much more interested in being an artist when I was a kid. Genuinely interested. And that was, everybody assumed that was what I would do. But, you know, we were very involved in the theater, me and my siblings. We all performed in the plays and watched rehearsals day in and day out. Knew the whole Shakespearean canon. Because he produced every single one of Shakespeare's plays, including Henry VIII and The Timon of Athens. He must have been a great guy. He was a very genial, sweet, wonderful man. Were his parents supportive of him going into the theater as well? No, he was a black sheep and my mom was a black sheep.

18:02When you went from theater to theater or town to town, you said you did even though there were universities. Was that having to adapt to a new place all the time? Yes, it's kind of like being a service brat, except I didn't go to a service brat school. I was the new kid in public schools all over Ohio and Massachusetts and graduated from Princeton High School in Princeton, New Jersey, where my dad ran the McCarter Theater. It was a crazy, pretty much starting in about fourth grade. We just moved and moved and moved. And did you keep painting? I kept painting. I mean, I was really serious right up until I went off to college, at which point I was the campus star within the first week.

18:49I was an experienced actor. Tell me about Harvard and going to university. First of all, do you remember the food? Can we talk about food and Harvard? All the cooks in all the dorms were these wonderful, beefy Irish women who just slopped out the food. Did you walk around Cambridge and discover what it was like to have Greek food or other kinds of food? What I most vividly remember about food at Harvard was Elsie's, the sandwich shop in Harvard Square, and the Fressers Special, and the big fat roast beef sandwiches. Do you remember when I went to Bennington? And so we had a term off, and I got a job at the Harvard Law School doing, I don't know what I did.

19:39I took books down from the shelves and kind of wrote a few reports. But I sold pretzels. Do you remember that pretzel stand in Harvard Square? Yes. Yeah, I worked there. Maybe I sold you. I bet you probably did. We're almost contemporaries. Nobody knows that about my life. I think I've got a few years on your routine. No, but I sold pretzels in Harvard Square. I liked doing that more than working in the Harvard Law School. Yeah. But I did get it. It was a great atmosphere, and Harvard is very heroic these days. It is. Yeah, we could have a moment on that, don't we think? protecting our universities and standing out for what they believe.

20:15Were you active politically in those days? You know, I graduated in 1967 and came off to London to study at Lambda, which pretty much separated me from all the political turmoil. I left the country just when everything flew apart. You know, here I was in London in 1968, which until now was the most catastrophic year in America. in recent American history. And ironically, at both moments, here I was in England, reading all the news from back home and thinking, what is going on? The minute I leave... Yeah, thank you. I know.

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22:36Welcome to the Smart Talks with IBM.

23:02agent. As a new student, you may not know, how do I do with my health and wellness issue? How many credits am I going to get for this given class? You could talk to someone and find out some of that, but maybe it's a little bit sensitive and you don't want to do that. Bissell told me, you could build an AI agent, a resource for new students that helps them navigate a new campus, register for classes, access the services they need, and even schedule appointments on their behalf, which in turn buys them more time to focus on their actual schoolwork. We can see patterns of how agents and assistants can help employees and customers and end users be more productive, automate workflows so they're not doing certain types of repetitive work over and over again, and streamlining their lives and making data more accessible to them 24 hours a day.

23:53To learn more about IBM's AI agents and how they can help your business, visit ibm.com slash agents. I came here in early 69, end of 68, 69. And I came with a group of friends, boyfriends and friends, who were escaping the draft. I always say that, you know, I probably agree that Vietnam was a class war because I, you know, poor farmers, poor people from who couldn't, didn't know how to get out of it, you know, were drafted. I don't know anybody. I know somebody who went to Vietnam, a few people from Williams or Dartmouth, but I don't know anybody who died there. And I hardly know anybody who went.

24:39Yeah. It's a real third rail of American society from that era. Yeah. People were so burned by that war, whether they participated or whether they resisted. It's just this subject of deep confusion. And you're right, I was here in London at exactly that time with so many expats and resistors, so many who were just confused with, what do I do? What do I do next? I'm not going to participate in this. There were people going to Sweden, trying to get to Canada, trying to go anywhere. And I remember, well, Al Gore was one of them. Another one was Donald Graham, who led Washington Post for so many years.

25:28They went to Vietnam. Yeah. John Kerry. John Kerry. We met, we had dinner with him the other night. Yeah, wonderful man. And we thought, what's gone wrong with Donnie Graham? He re-upped for a second tour of duty. What has happened to him? And then he came back and joined the Washington, D.C. police force. We thought he was, you know, basically he was what he considered his duty as an American citizen. And we all thought it was an aberration. I mean, that's how crazy it was, that period of time. It was a crazy time. So then you came back following your life. You were at Lambda. Yeah. And was that a discovery?

26:09Oh, it was great. What did you discover living in Europe? Well, it was a fantastic... Was it the first time you'd been to Europe? It was the first time I'd been to England. I'd been to France, but I'd never been to England, even though I'd grown up in a total Anglophile family. Yeah. And I had studied English history and literature at Harvard, and I always said within the first two weeks in London, I'd learned more about English history than I ever knew before. and you suddenly I knew it never even occurred to me to look at a map and see where all these Shakespearean characters came from suddenly there was Kent and Northumberland and Salisbury and Rochester all of these Gloucester a part that I'd played in King Lear I never bothered to look at where Gloucester was you know so no it was a wonderful time and it was a great time in English theater.

27:04Yeah. What else was going on? Peter Brook was doing his greatest work. Peter Hall was the head of the RSC. Trevor Nunn took over from him at age 27. Did you meet Kenneth Tynan? I never met Kenneth Tynan. No, but I met a lot of other remarkable people. Yeah. Met John Gielgud in his dresser. And Joan Littlewood was that later? She was working way out in the East, in Stratford, which of course the gravitational center has shifted east, but back then that was like working on Mars. Well, I was on a Fulbright. Could you eat out? I keep going back to food. We ate a lot. I was in my first marriage, a very youthful marriage, and we ate a lot of Indian food.

27:47I've never tasted better Indian food. It is good. Do you still eat it? Yes. It's interesting how the, I always think, well, we know because of colonialism, how the British is, I hope I don't insult any of you, but there is a palette of British food, which is quite sort of, what would we say, dull? And then to go for, of all cuisines, you know, in every small town all over Britain, there's Indian restaurants, you know. And that, I agree. But I also remember, you know, the cliche was that England had absolutely awful food. No, I don't agree. But it wasn't true at all. There were so many wonderful, innovative restaurants.