Tom Ligon
American actor
Thomas Bryant Ligon (September 10, 1940 – June 26, 2026) was an American actor. He appeared in the films Paint Your Wagon, Jump, and Bang the Drum Slowly (in which he also sang the title song) as well as the television series The Young and the Restless, and Oz.
Life and career
Thomas Bryant Ligon was born in New Orleans, Louisiana September 10, 1940, and was of Cajun ancestry. Mentored by folksinger and actor Gordon Heath in Paris, beginning in the mid 1950s, Ligon then attended St. Albans School (Washington, D.C.), where he suffered a broken leg while playing football, and, sans sports, his interests turned solidly toward theater. At Yale, where he was a member of Skull and Bones and graduated as an English major (1962), he was discovered by Tennessee Williams, who saw his performance as Kilroy in Williams' play, Camino Real at the Yale Dramatic Association. Ligon became one of the most sought after young actors in New York in the 1960s.
Ligon appeared on many prominent regional stages in the United States, notably the Arena Stage where he played the title role in Billy Budd and in Hard Travelin' by Millard Lampell in 1964, and Actors Theatre of Louisville, where he played Hank Czerniak, the polka king, in Evelyn and the Polka King.
He married Katharine Dunfee Clarke (1948–2009) on December 31, 1976.
Ligon created the role of Orson in the prize-winning Off-Broadway musical Your Own Thing (1968), and starred on Broadway opposite Geraldine Page in Angela, by Sumner Arthur Long, and with Sandy Duncan in John Patrick's Love is a Time of Day.
“Tom Ligon” enters the record as american actor. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ligon, American and actor can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Tom Ligon” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Ligon, American and actor provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20657184. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1940, 2026, 1962 and 1964.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tom Ligon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.