Waterston, Sam

The Oxford Companion to American Theatre | 2004 | 700+ words | Copyright

Waterston, Sam (b.1940), actor. The dark, thoughtful leading man was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and educated at Yale and the Sorbonne, training at the American Actors Workshop in Paris and with Herbert Berghof and Frank Corsaro in New York. After some experience in stock, Waterston made his Broadway debut in 1963. Later that year he performed for the first time at the New York Shakespeare Festival, where he often returned and gave his finest performances, such as Prince Hal in Henry IV (1968), Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing (1972), Hamlet (1972 and 1975), and Prospero in The Tempest (1974). Other provocative performances include the tramp Vladimir in Waiting for Godot (1978), the preoccupied shrink Oliver DeVreck in Lunch Hour (1980), the American diplomat John Honeyman in A Walk in the Woods (1988), and the title president‐to‐be in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1993). Mel Gussow in the New York Times described his Benedict as “sharp‐tongued and headstrong, never losing sight of the character's propulsively romantic nature. . . . Waterston leaps at it with enormous grace and agility.”

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Gerald Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak. "Waterston, Sam." The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. 2004. Encyclopedia.com. 28 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

Gerald Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak. "Waterston, Sam." The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. 2004. Encyclopedia.com. (May 28, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O149-WaterstonSam.html

Gerald Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak. "Waterston, Sam." The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. 2004. Retrieved May 28, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O149-WaterstonSam.html

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