Nathan Lane

Nathan Lane (born Joseph Lane; February 3, 1956) is an American actor. He has been on stage and screen in both comedic and dramatic roles. 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 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. 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. A six-time Tony Award nominee, he has won three times, 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), and The Front Page (2016). Among his 25 Broadway credits are The Man Who Came To Dinner (2000), The Odd Couple (2005), Butley (2006), 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 Ironweed (1987), Frankie and Johnny (1991), The Lion King (1994), The Birdcage (1996), Mouse Hunt (1997), Nicholas Nickleby (2002), The Producers (2005), and Beau Is Afraid (2023). He received the Primetime Emmy Award for his role in the Hulu mystery comedy series Only Murders in the Building in 2022. He has been Emmy-nominated eight times for his guest roles in Frasier, Mad About You, Modern Family, The Good Wife and Only Murders in the Building. He has also won two Daytime Emmy Awards. 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–present), and Mid-Century Modern (2025).