American actor of stage, television and film, onscreen since 1967, who made his reputation in the early ‘70s with sensitive performances in such films as “The Great Gatsby,” 1974, “Rancho DeLuxe,” 1975, “Heaven’s Gate,” 1979 and “The Killing Fields,” 1984, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. He also appeared in numerous Broadway performances such as “Gore Vidal’s Lincoln,” 1988, and “Terrorist on Trial,” 1988. Tall and lean, he is noted as an intelligent, introspective leading man on stage and screen.
Waterston is the third of four kids and remembers his childhood as idyllic. The son of a school teacher father who was a part-time director, and an artist mother. His father directed him in a school version of “Antigone” when he was six years old, and he has been in drama ever since. He was educated at Groton and Yale on scholarship, and though he was in Yale’s dramatic society, he left for Paris during his junior year to study at the Sorbonne, intending to stay away from the stage. Instead, he fell in with a group of expatriate American actors, and went right back to work.
His first marriage to Barbara Johns produced one son, Jamie, in 1970. He married Lynn Louisa Woodruff in January 1976, and they have three children growing up in their rural Connecticut home.
In 1991, Waterston played into the TV series “I’ll Fly Away” for two years. In 1994 he moved into the series “Law and Order,” playing a hard-nosed attorney, still a favorite on TV in 2000. On the side, he has formed a productions company, tried a bit of screenwriting and produced a TV movie in 1995, “The Journey of August King.” In 1999, he produced and had a small role in a Showtime special, “A House Divided.”
Family still takes priority in his free time with sailing as a favorite pastime.
Waterston received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2010 and was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 2012.
Link to Wikipedia biography