In the span of his long acting career, one thing is sure; John Lithgow is a mentor, both literally and figuratively.
Lithgow’s best-known role is arguably the alien commander Dick Solomon in the sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun, which ran from 1996 to 2001.
Despite the sitcom’s massive popularity, Lithgow said his most memorable role was in the award-winning 1988 play M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang.
Starring alongside BD Wong, he plays a French civil servant who falls in love with a star of the Peking opera, not knowing that the woman is a spy and actually a man cross-dressing in order to seduce him and extract information.
“An extraordinary, preposterous story, but David Henry Hwang took that and turned it into an extraordinary metaphor for the differences between the East and the West in particular, but Western men and Eastern women,” he said.