Nathan Lane

Nathan Lane is a Generator — built with the deep, replenishable stamina to do eight shows a week for months on end, and to actually seem to enjoy it. Born Joseph Lane in Jersey City in 1956, he grew up the youngest of three boys in a working-class Irish Catholic family, his father a truck driver with a drinking problem, his mother managing manic depression. He was a small, verbal, theatrical kid who found early on that making a room laugh was both a survival tool and a genuine pleasure. He turned down a scholarship to St. Joseph's University because the family couldn't afford the extras, and started auditioning instead.

He took the name Nathan (after Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls) because there was already a Joe Lane in Equity, and spent the late seventies and early eighties in the New York trenches — regional theater, off-Broadway, a comedy duo with Patrick Stack, sitcom guest spots. It was a classic 1/3 profile apprenticeship: study everything, try everything, and take the bruises as tuition. He'd later say he'd been a working actor for nearly two decades before anyone outside the theater knew his name, and he treated that long climb as the kind of learning you can only do by getting it wrong in front of people.

The breakthrough was Albin in The Birdcage (1996), and then Max Bialystock opposite Matthew Broderick in The Producers (2001), which won him his first Tony and made him, for a stretch, the most bankable leading man on Broadway. What audiences were responding to was partly the technique — the impeccable timing, the way he could land a punchline with the exact right pressure at the exact right beat — and partly sheer wattage. On stage he runs on a kind of combustible vitality that fills whatever room he's in, and he's spoken often about how the live audience is what actually feeds him. Film he tolerates; theater he needs.

He came out publicly in 1999 in The Advocate, after the Matthew Shepard murder, saying he no longer felt he could stay quiet. It was a decision made from a full-body knowing that the moment had arrived rather than a strategic career calculation, and he's been candid since about how much fear preceded it. He married theater producer Devlin Elliott in 2015. In interviews he tends toward self-deprecation and long, well-shaped anecdotes — the storyteller's instinct to shape a life into scenes you can actually hand to someone.

The later career has been an exercise in refusing to coast. He took Roy Cohn in the National Theatre's Angels in America and won another Tony; he did The Iceman Cometh opposite Denzel Washington; he's become the show-stealing character actor on prestige television (The Good Wife, Only Murders in the Building, The Gilded Age). What runs underneath all of it is an unwillingness to keep repeating the trick that worked last time and a durable commitment to the craft that outlasts any single role — the working actor who never quite stopped acting like he had something to prove.