Samuel Atkinson "Sam" Waterston (born
November 15 1940) is an
American actor noted particularly for his portrayal of
Jack McCoy on the
NBC television series Law & Order. He has also appeared in many feature films.
Biography
Early life
Waterston, one of four siblings, was born in
Cambridge,
Massachusetts. His mother, Alice Tucker (
née Atkinson), was an American
Mayflower descendant and worked as a landscape painter, and his father, George Chychele Waterston, was an immigrant from
Leith,
Scotland and a
semanticist and language teacher.
[Ancestry of Sam Waterston][Sam Waterston Biography - Biography.com] Waterston attended both the
Brooks School, a boarding school in
North Andover, Massachusetts, and the
Groton School. He entered
Yale University on a scholarship in 1958 and graduated with a
BA in 1962. After graduating from Yale, he attended the Clinton Playhouse for several months. Waterston also attended the
Sorbonne in
Paris and the American Actors Workshop.
