James Lipton

Louis James Lipton (September 19, 1926 – March 2, 2020) was an American writer, actor, talk show host, and dean emeritus of the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University in New York City. He was the executive producer, writer, and host of the Bravo cable television series Inside the Actors Studio, which debuted in 1994. He retired from the show in 2018.

Early life

Louis James Lipton was born on September 19, 1926, in Detroit, Michigan, the only child of Betty (née Weinberg), a teacher and librarian, and Lawrence Lipton, a journalist and beat poet. Known for writing the Beat Generation chronicle The Holy Barbarians, Lawrence was a graphic designer, a columnist for the Jewish Daily Forward, and a publicity director for a movie theater. Lawrence was a Polish Jewish emigrant (from Łódź), whose surname was originally Lipschitz. Betty's parents were Russian Jews. His parents divorced when Lipton was six, and his father abandoned the family.

Lipton's family struggled financially, and he started to work when he was 13 years old. He worked in high school as a newspaper copy boy for the Detroit Times and as an actor in the Catholic Theater of Detroit and in radio. Lipton had initially intended to become an attorney. After graduating from Central High School in Detroit, he attended Wayne State University for one year in the mid-1940s and enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Lipton talked about his time in Paris in the 1950s, when he worked for about a year as a pimp. On the Today show, Lipton clarified that he had worked as a beneficent maque in the regulated prostitution business.