Personal Life
Waterston's first wife was Barbara Rutledge-Johns. Waterston and his first wife had one son, James, also an actor. Waterston married his second wife, former model Lynn Louisa Woodruff, in 1976. They have three children, daughters Katherine and Elisabeth, who are also actors, and a son, Graham.
An active humanitarian, Waterston donates time to organizations such as Oceana, where he is a board member, Refugees International, Meals on Wheels, The United Way, and The Episcopal Actors' Guild of America.
In 2012, Waterston received the Goodermote Humanitarian Award from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health for his longtime support of refugees around the world.
Waterston, a practicing Episcopalian, narrated the 1999 biographical documentary of Episcopal civil rights martyr Jonathan Myrick Daniels, Here Am I, Send Me.
He was a spokesman for the Unity08 movement, which unsuccessfully sought to run a non- or bipartisan presidential ticket in the 2008 presidential election. Waterston has stated that he was a Democrat until he left the party in disgust following the airing of Lyndon B. Johnson's infamous "Daisy" election ad in 1964. Waterston has also appeared in print ads, and announced in television commercials, for the liberal magazine The Nation.
In 2002, Waterston and fellow Law & Order castmate Jerry Orbach were honored as "Living Landmarks" by the New York Landmarks Conservancy.
Waterston is a longtime friend and fan of the Mark Morris Dance Group and hosted the television presentation of Mozart Dances on PBS' Live from Lincoln Center on August 16, 2007.
Read more about this topic: Sam Waterston
Famous quotes containing the words personal life, personal and/or life:
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters “woman’s peculiar sphere,” her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one’s self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place, everywhere conceded—a place earned by personal merit, not an artificial attainment by inheritance, wealth, family and position.”
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“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
—Bible: New Testament Jesus, in John, 15:13.
In Ulysses, James Joyce wrote, “Greater love than this ... no man hath that a man lay down his wife for his friend.”