Tom Ligon, Young and the Restless Actor, Dies at 85

Tom Ligon, the actor who won over daytime fans as Lucas Prentiss on The Young and the Restless and sang a cowboy ballad in one of the saddest baseball movies ever put on film, has died. He was 85. His friend Steve Hayes broke the news in a Facebook post, saying Ligon died on Friday, June 26, in New York City. SAG-AFTRA New York Local confirmed his death the following Monday. No cause has been released.

Ligon was a Greenwich Village fixture, the kind of working actor who never became a household name but showed up everywhere for six straight decades. Broadway, off-Broadway, soap operas, movie theaters, prime-time cop shows. If you watched television between 1965 and 2010, you saw his face at some point, probably more than once. Here is a look back at a guy who packed an unusually full career into 85 years.

The soap role that made him a heartthrob

From 1978 to 1982, Ligon played Lucas Lorenzo Prentiss on CBS's The Young and the Restless, and that role is what earned him a loyal, some would say rabid, fan base. His character sat right in the middle of a blockbuster romance tangle involving the Prentiss brothers and the Brooks sisters. His on-screen brother Lance was played first by John McCook, then by Dennis Cole after McCook left. His leading ladies were Victoria Mallory as Leslie Brooks and Jaime Lyn Bauer as Lorie Brooks.

Four years of that kind of storyline builds a following that sticks around for life. Y&R fans still talk about the Prentiss-Brooks quadrangle as one of the show's classic runs, and Ligon was a big reason it worked.

The baseball movie that wrecks people

Before the soap fame, Ligon landed a small but memorable part in the 1973 drama Bang the Drum Slowly, starring a young Robert De Niro. Ligon played Piney Woods, a backup catcher. In one quiet locker room scene, he picked up a guitar and sang the old cowboy song "Streets of Laredo". If you have seen the movie, you remember that moment. It is one of those scenes that sneaks up on you.

The film is about a dying ballplayer, and it does not go easy on you. Ligon's singing threaded right through the heartbreak of it. For a guy with a supporting role, he left a real mark on a movie that people still recommend to friends who like to cry at sports films.

He threw a burglar out his window at 72

Here is the story that turned Ligon into a folk hero for about a week in 2013. He was 72 years old when a career burglar climbed through the window of his Greenwich Village apartment. Ligon did not call for help or hide. He hit the intruder with a fist to the forehead and a loud shout, and sent the man tumbling to the pavement below.

When a reporter told him the guy was a longtime professional thief, Ligon delivered a line only an actor could. "Well, I guess he's not having much of a career right now," he said. "It's like acting, you've got your ups and downs." That quote pretty much sums up the man. Sharp, funny, and completely unbothered by a break-in he had just personally shut down.

Tennessee Williams gave him his big break

Thomas Bryant Ligon was born in New Orleans on September 10, 1940. His father was a U.S. Army colonel who later worked for the Defense Department. Ligon went to St. Albans School in Washington, D.C., where a broken leg in a football game ended his sports days and pushed him toward the stage. From there he went to Yale, joined the secret Skull and Bones society, and graduated in 1962 as an English major.

His lucky break came at Yale, where he played Kilroy in Tennessee Williams' Camino Real. The great playwright himself was in the audience and took notice. That was all it took to launch Ligon into New York, where he shared a $25-a-month sublet in the Village with another struggling young actor named Sam Waterston. His 1963 Broadway debut in the comedy Have I Got a Girl for You! closed on opening night, but he kept going.

One of the busiest young actors in New York

By the late 1960s, Ligon was one of the most in-demand young actors in the city. He created the role of Orson in the prize-winning off-Broadway musical Your Own Thing in 1968. He starred on Broadway opposite Geraldine Page in Angela and alongside Sandy Duncan in Love Is a Time of Day, both in 1969. He also played the title role in Billy Budd at Arena Stage in Washington.

The movies came calling too. He appeared in the 1969 film musical Paint Your Wagon with Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood, made his big-screen debut in the acclaimed drama Nothing But a Man, and played a hillbilly demolition derby driver in the 1971 film Jump. He later showed up in The Last American Hero with Jeff Bridges, plus Joyride and Young Doctors in Love. In 2000 he went back to his stage roots, playing George Gibbs in a well-reviewed New York production of Our Town.

He shared a scene with an unknown Brad Pitt

Ligon has one of those quiet Hollywood trivia footnotes people love. In the 1989 horror flick Cutting Class, his on-screen son was played by a young, not-yet-famous Brad Pitt. This was well before Pitt became a movie star, back when he was just another kid taking whatever roles came his way.

He also picked up an unlikely champion late in life. Quentin Tarantino praised Ligon's 1971 film Jump as "this amazing film that no one's ever seen," calling it "hilarious and very satirical" in a 2013 interview. When the director of Pulp Fiction singles out your obscure car-racing comedy from 40 years earlier, you have made an impression somewhere.

A soap and TV mainstay across every network

Y&R was his signature, but Ligon worked daytime television all over the dial. He got his soap start on the ABC show A World Apart as T.D. Drikard from 1970 to 1971. Later he played Billy Bristow on Loving, William Addison on Santa Barbara, Dr. Snow on All My Children, and Ted Briar on Another World. That is a résumé that spanned ABC, NBC, and CBS.

His prime-time guest spots read like a channel-surf through classic TV: Starsky & Hutch, Charlie's Angels, Police Woman, Baretta, Dallas, Medical Center, Baa Baa Black Sheep, and Law & Order. From 2001 to 2003 he had a recurring run on HBO's gritty prison drama Oz, playing inmate Alvin Yood, a small-town sheriff convicted of aggravated assault. Not many actors go from a swoony soap heartthrob to a convicted sheriff on Oz, but Ligon did it and made both believable.

A union man and a devoted husband

Off camera, Ligon put in serious work for his fellow actors. He was a SAG-AFTRA member for 60 years and served as chair of its National Seniors Committee and co-chair of the New York Seniors Committee. He also sat on the board of the New York Screen Actors Guild from 2005 to 2007. The union honored that six decades of membership when it confirmed his passing.

In 1976 he married actress and dialect coach Katharine Dunfee Clarke, known professionally as K.C. Ligon. She came from an acting family and built her own impressive career coaching some of the biggest names in the business, including James Earl Jones, Laura Linney, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. They stayed married until her death in 2009 from a blood disorder at age 60. Ligon never remarried.

Tom Ligon was the kind of performer who kept the whole thing running. He filled out casts, mentored younger actors, fought for older ones, and quietly built a body of work that touched Broadway stages, movie screens, and living room televisions across the country. Fans who grew up on Lucas Prentiss will remember the soap star. Movie buffs will remember the guy singing in that locker room. And anyone who read the papers in 2013 will remember the 72-year-old who tossed a burglar out his window and cracked a joke about it. Not a bad way to be remembered.