Tom Ligon, Character Actor and SAG-AFTRA Stalwart, Dies at 85

He was rarely the star, but for sixty years Tom Ligon was the kind of actor who made the work around him better — and who fought to protect the people who do it.

From New Orleans to New York

Thomas Bryant Ligon was born September 10, 1940, in New Orleans, the son of an Army colonel, and graduated from Yale in 1962. He arrived in New York when its theater world was wide open to a young actor with presence — an early roommate was a fellow newcomer named Sam Waterston — and by the mid-1960s, Deadline noted, he was "one of the most sought after young actors in New York." He made his film debut in 1964's Nothing But a Man and created the role of Orson in the long-running Off-Broadway musical Your Own Thing in 1968.

A career of range and reliability

Ligon's was a career built on range rather than a single signature role. He appeared in the 1969 film musical Paint Your Wagon with Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood, and on Broadway opposite Geraldine Page. His most-admired screen work came in the early 1970s: in John Hancock's Bang the Drum Slowly (1973), he played the backup catcher Piney Woods alongside Robert De Niro and Michael Moriarty, his rendition of "Streets of Laredo" a quietly indelible moment, The Hollywood Reporter noted. To daytime audiences he was best known as Lucas Prentiss on CBS's The Young and the Restless from 1978 to 1982, and he later took a recurring role on HBO's Oz, with guest turns across Dallas, Law & Order and many more.

Sixty years for the union

Within the industry's labor movement, Ligon's name was synonymous with commitment. A SAG-AFTRA member for some six decades, he served on the New York Local's board and chaired the union's National Seniors Committee, and he backed the 2012 merger that created SAG-AFTRA. He kept up his committee work into his later years.

A life in the city

A longtime resident of Greenwich Village, Ligon was married to the actress and dialect coach Katharine Dunfee Clarke, known as K.C. Ligon, who died in 2009. No cause of death was announced. He leaves behind a body of work — and an institution he helped sustain — as his legacy.