Biography

July 12, 1941 · Los Angeles, California, USA

John Henry Christopher Lahr

Son of actor Bert Lahr, best known as the Cowardly Lion in Le Magicien d'Oz (1939).

His godfather was Jack Haley, the "Wizard of Oz" co-star of his father.

Portrayed by Wallace Shawn in "Prick Up Your Ears" (1987).

He constructed "Elaine Stritch at Liberty", performed in London at the Old Vic Theatre in 2002, and was nominated for a 2003 Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for Best Entertainment.

Stepfather of Cynthia Cleese.

[on the favorite of his own published works] Each book inevitably engineers some emotional transition in a writer's life, but given one I'd say my first book, 'Notes on a Cowardly Lion', which I finished the week my father died when I was twenty-six. In it, I mourned him and preserved him.

I'm not a fan of science fiction - life on earth is mysterious and terrifying enough. I'm often drawn by tone and by the slant of the language. The way the sentences pop. A few well-angled sentences announce to me if this is a voice whose command I can trust or whose quirkiness intrigues. Style, after all, is metabolism. Even if it's non-fiction, the writing has to have a pulse, something I can feel beneath the facts.

[on who are his favorite playwrights] An impossible question. But, since the greatest show on earth is the show of human emotion, for complexity of character, psychological nuance and downright dramatic behaviour, it's only three: Anton Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, August Wilson.