This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Our guest today, John Lithgow, is an actor you can probably recall from a half-dozen rolls off the top of your head.

But the remarkable thing about his nearly 200 performances on stage, screen, and television is that age 80, he's still going strong.

You can see him playing an intelligence agent with Jeff Bridges in the FX action

series The Old Van. He plays the character Dumbledore in a new HBO Harry Potter series that

premieres in December, and he's starring now on Broadway, doing eight performances a week in the

play Giant, about a troubling side to renowned children's author

Roald Dahl. Among Lithgow's many career honors are Oscar nominations for his roles in the

film The World According to Garp in terms of Endearment, and six primetime Emmy Awards for playing

Winston Churchill in The Crown, a serial killer in the series Dexter, and an alien

visiting Earth in the sitcom Third Rock from the Sun. He's been nominated for six Tony

awards and won twice, including once for his very first appearance on Broadway. Lithgow has also

written several children's books, a memoir titled Drama, an Actors' Education,

and the Dumpty Trilogy, three books of satirical poems inspired by the current occupant of the

White House. Luthko's current play Giant is set in 1983, when Roald Dahl ignited a controversy

by writing an article with views that were widely seen as anti-Semitic.

In the play, Dahl and his fiancé are at home in discussion with the British and an American representative of Dahl's publishers who want him to say something to soften his message and diffuse the controversy.

It soon emerges that the American rep is a practicing Jewish

woman, and Dole isn't backing down. The play was first performed in London with Lithgow starring

as role Doll. He and the play won Lawrence Olivier Awards, the British equivalent of the Tony.

John Lithgow, welcome to fresh Air. Thank you, Dave.

I feel welcome.

You're playing Doll, who is kind of, it's oversimplistically call him a villain here,

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