Thomas Aldredge

Aldredge was born in Dayton, Ohio, the son of Lucienne Juliet Marcillat and William Joseph Aldredge, a colonel in the United States Army Air Corps. He originally intended to become a lawyer and enrolled as a pre-law student at the University of Dayton. In 1947, after attending a performance of the original Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire, he abandoned law and committed to acting, transferring to DePaul University's Goodman School of Drama, where he earned a BFA in 1953.

He worked in Chicago Educational Television as producer and director from 1955 to 1957 before moving to New York, where he appeared off-Broadway in Electra in 1957 and made his Broadway debut in 1959 as Danny in The Nervous Set, a musical written and directed by Theodore J. Flicker.

In November 1960 Flicker recruited Aldredge as one of the founding cast members of The Premise, a professional improvised comedy theatre at 154 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. The original ensemble included Joan Darling, George Segal, and Dolores Welber. The show ran for 1,249 performances with scenes created entirely from audience suggestions and current events. Over the course of its run, the company grew to include Buck Henry, Gene Hackman, James Frawley, Peter Bonerz, Sandy Baron, and others. The Premise expanded to the Shoreham Theatre in Washington, D.C. in 1962 and to the Comedy Theatre in London's West End that same year. In 1964 Aldredge appeared in The Troublemaker, a film based on The Premise directed by Flicker.

Aldredge's subsequent Broadway career spanned five decades and more than thirty productions. He received his first Tony nomination for Sticks and Bones (1972) and won a Drama Desk Award for the same role. He originated the role of Norman Thayer Jr. in On Golden Pond (1978) opposite Frances Sternhagen, appeared opposite Elizabeth Taylor in The Little Foxes (1981), and originated the dual role of the Narrator and the Mysterious Man in Sondheim and Lapine's Into the Woods (1987). He originated Dr. Tambourri in Sondheim and Lapine's Passion (1994), receiving his fourth Tony nomination, and reprised the Narrator in the 2002 Into the Woods revival for his fifth nomination. His television career included 23 episodes as Hugh DeAngelis in The Sopranos, along with roles in Damages, Boardwalk Empire, and Law and Order. He was married to the celebrated costume designer Theoni V. Aldredge from 1953 until her death in January 2011. He died six months later on July 22, 2011, in Tampa, Florida, from lymphoma at age 83. His career on Broadway encompassed dozens of productions across five decades, from the 1950s through the 1990s, and his work as a character actor extended to film and television, where he appeared in productions including Network (1976), The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979), and Tootsie (1982). His stage work often paired him with directors who valued detailed naturalistic character work, and his Tony Award nomination for Into the Woods (1987) recognized a body of work built on precisely observed comic and dramatic characterization.