About Nathan Lane
Nathan Lane (born Joseph Lane; February 3, 1956) is an American actor. Known for his versatile roles on stage and screen, he has received numerous accolades including three Tony Awards, seven Drama Desk Awards, a Laurence Olivier Award, three Emmy Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Actor Award. Lane was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2006 and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2008. In 2010, The New York Times hailed Lane as being "the greatest stage entertainer of the decade". Lane made his professional theatre debut in 1978 in an off-Broadway production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. During that time he also briefly appeared as one half of the comedy team of Stack and Lane, until he was cast in the 1982 Broadway revival of Noël Coward's Present Laughter directed by and starring George C. Scott. That led to an extensive career onstage, where he had a long friendship and fruitful collaboration with the playwright Terrence McNally which started in 1989 with the Manhattan Theater Club production of The Lisbon Traviata. He has won three Tony Awards: for Best Actor in a Musical for Pseudolus in Stephen Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1996) and Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks' The Producers (2001), and Best Featured Actor in a Play for Roy Cohn in Tony Kushner's Angels in America (2018). He was also Tony-nominated for Guys and Dolls (1992), The Nance (2013), The Front Page (2016), and Death of a Salesman (2026). Among his 25 Broadway credits are The Man Who Came To Dinner (2000), The Frogs (2004), The Odd Couple (2005), Butley (2006), November (2008), Waiting for Godot (2009), The Addams Family (2010), It's Only a Play (2014), Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus (2019), and Pictures from Home (2023). Lane has acted in films such as The Lion King (1994), The Birdcage (1996), Mouse Hunt (1997), The Producers (2005), and Beau Is Afraid (2023). He received the Primetime Emmy Award for his role in the Hulu series Only Murders in the Building in 2022. He has received eight Emmy nominations for his guest roles in Frasier, Mad About You, Modern Family, The Good Wife and Only Murders. He portrayed F. Lee Bailey in the FX miniseries The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story (2016) and Dominick Dunne in the Netflix anthology series Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story (2024). He has also starred in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels (2020), The Gilded Age (2022–2025), and Mid-Century Modern (2025). Accepted to Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia on a drama scholarship, Joseph Lane was accompanied on what was supposed to be his first day there by his older brother Dan. In 1996 Lane appeared in the film The Birdcage, for which he received his first Golden Globe nomination. In 1992, he won an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence of Performance. Lane has received numerous accolades including three Tony Awards, seven Drama Desk Awards, a Laurence Olivier Award, three Emmy Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. Lane received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2006 and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2008.
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