John Lithgow celebrates his 81st birthday on October 19, 2026. He was born in Rochester, New York, on October 19, 1945. Most fans know him as the alien patriarch of 3rd Rock from the Sun or the preacher who banned dancing in Footloose. In 2011 he published a memoir, Drama: An Actor’s Education, and in it he wrote candidly about the costar romance that ended his first marriage.
He has called that period one of the great crises of his life. It also set up the meeting that changed everything after it, and the woman at the center of that second chapter is still with him today.
How Did John Lithgow Become A Broadway Star So Young?
Theater ran in the family. His father, Arthur Lithgow, was an actor, teacher and producer who founded theater festivals and later ran the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey. According to The Globe and Mail, Arthur moved from job to job so often that his son attended eight different secondary schools.
Lithgow studied history and English literature at Harvard and graduated in 1967. A Fulbright scholarship then took him to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He had already married Jean Taynton in 1966, and the couple had a son, Ian. The Globe and Mail described him in those years as a dutiful son who became a husband and father very young.
His Broadway debut came in 1973 with The Changing Room, and it won him a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play. Four years later he was cast opposite one of the most admired actresses in the world.
Who Was The Co-Star Who Changed His Life?
In 1977, Lithgow joined a Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie. His leading lady was Liv Ullmann, the Norwegian star of Ingmar Bergman’s films. Ullmann earned a Tony nomination for the role. Rolling Stone Australia has described Lithgow as her costar who “briefly became her lover.”
Lithgow did not hide it in his memoir. The Globe and Mail wrote that he “dashed it all to pieces” by “falling madly in love” with Ullmann. Publisher HarperCollins described the romance as the reason his early first marriage came to an end. He and Jean Taynton divorced in 1980, according to Wikipedia.
When the book came out, he talked about that chapter with the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He called it “one of the most important crises in my life at a time when I was having some of my greatest successes.” The Washington Examiner, reviewing the memoir, noted that he wrote openly about the infidelities behind the breakup.
The timing he mentioned was real. His film career was about to take off, and it would carry him through every decade since.
What Happened To His Career After Broadway?
Lithgow earned back-to-back Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor. The first came for playing Roberta Muldoon in The World According to Garp in 1982, and the second for Terms of Endearment in 1983. A year later he played the Rev. Shaw Moore in Footloose. In 1987 he played a dad whose family takes in Bigfoot in Harry and the Hendersons.
Television made him a household name in a new way. As Dick Solomon on 3rd Rock from the Sun, he won three Emmys for lead actor in a comedy. He later played the serial killer Arthur Mitchell on Dexter and Winston Churchill on The Crown, both of which brought more Emmys.
The stage never let him go. In June 2026 he won his third Tony, playing Roald Dahl in Giant, a win we covered in John Lithgow’s Tony Awards history. He is also set to play Albus Dumbledore in HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter series.
Through nearly all of those roles, the same person has been waiting at home. She was not an actress at all.
Who Did John Lithgow Marry Next?
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In 1980, a mutual friend set Lithgow up on a lunch date with Mary Yeager, a young historian starting her career at UCLA. He took one detail about her as a sign. “I noticed she lived at the corner of Montana Street and Harvard Avenue,” he told People. “And actually, we were married about a year later.”
They wed in 1981 and had two children, a son and a daughter. Yeager spent decades as a professor of economic and business history at UCLA. Lithgow has joked about how mismatched that looks on paper. “God never meant professors and actors to get married,” he told People in 2025.
They make it work with a simple routine. When he films far from home, Yeager flies in for the last two weeks of the shoot, and then they take a holiday together. “It’s been completely wonderful,” he told People in 2024.
There was one more graceful turn in the story. On March 25, 2022, at the Academy’s Governors Awards in Los Angeles, Lithgow was the one who presented Liv Ullmann with her honorary Oscar. The Associated Press reported that he recalled working with her on Anna Christie. He then told the room that Bergman would never have been considered one of the great filmmakers without her.
