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A winner of five Emmys and two Golden Globes, John Lithgow is one of America's most accomplished actors. He's also the author of the memoir Drama: An Actor’s Education. For this week's episode of the New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present John Lithgow discussing Shakespeare, his father, and bedtime stories.

When his father became ill, Lithgow returned to a beloved childhood ritual, reading a bedtime story aloud:

"My father—as I’ve told you, he was a great Shakespearean, he was a great man of the theater, and he had a huge, genial nature, he was very generous-hearted and had a great sense of humor, and when he was eighty-six years old, he’d had an operation, he was very ill, and he was very depressed. He became a different person, and to all appearances he’d lost the will to live, and I found myself in a situation where I was taking care of him and my mom for a whole month trying to work out some sort of care for him in the moment of this crisis and I knew my big job was to simply cheer him up, get him going again, and nothing worked. And I had the bright idea about halfway through my time with him to read them bedtime stories. And it was this big fat book, called Tellers of Tales, that he had used to read us stories when we were all little children, and I looked through their bookcases and I found that book and that evening when they were all tucked into bed, I showed them the book just like little children, told them to pick a story, the way we did. And the story he picked was 'Uncle Fred Flits By,' by P. G. Wodehouse, which I recognized immediately and remembered it was one of our favorite stories, but I’d totally forgotten it."

At his father's funeral, John Lithgow read a passage from Cymbeline, a Shakespearean play about the life of a Celtic king:

"It’s to me the most beautiful thing Shakespeare about death, and death and life, and valuing life while it lasts. The superb thing about this and it speaks just volumes about Shakespeare, is that the entire poem is a joke. This is a poem spoken or sung, it’s called a song, over the body of a young dead man. The two people who are speaking this poem are two brothers who don’t know that the man, number one, is not dead; number two, is not a man, it’s a woman dressed as a man; number three, is their own sister. They don’t know any of this. It’s a big joke on them. And yet they speak the most beautiful, deeply melancholy meditation on death and mourning because they have grown to love this fake man so deeply."

Lithgow still vividly recalls the sound of his father's voice performing Shakespeare with a grand, theatrical bellow:

"I have heard, there are a couple of little scraps of recording tape that capture him from like the early 1950s when he was a much younger man than I performing Brutus in high tragedy and Dr. Caius in low farce in Merry Wives of Windsor, and it’s unbelievably stirring for me to hear that, because I— he, it’s a distant memory, but yes I do. He had a kind of stentorian, kind of grand and old-fashioned way of performing Shakespeare. A lot of it came from the fact that he and his companies acted Shakespeare out of doors with no amplification so it was, 'Once more into the breach, dear friends . . .' It was literally yelled. They had to yell everything the way the Greeks had to yell and yet give it some substance of humanity."

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