Ronald Holgate Video | Celebrity Interview and Paparazzi

Ronald "Ron" Holgate (born May 26, 1937, Aberdeen, South Dakota) is a American actor and opera singer. He is known for winning the Tony Award for Best Supporting Actor as Richard Henry Lee in the original Broadway production of 1776. The son of a school superintendent and a drama teacher, raised in South Dakota, Holgate originally intended to become a classical actor and studied drama with Alvina Krause at Northwestern University. While there, however, he was discovered by Boris Goldovsky, and went on to study opera at both Tanglewood and the New England Conservatory. In 1959, Holgate, a... MORE

Ronald "Ron" Holgate (born May 26, 1937, Aberdeen, South Dakota) is a American actor and opera singer. He is known for winning the Tony Award for Best Supporting Actor as Richard Henry Lee in the original Broadway production of 1776. The son of a school superintendent and a drama teacher, raised in South Dakota, Holgate originally intended to become a classical actor and studied drama with Alvina Krause at Northwestern University. While there, however, he was discovered by Boris Goldovsky, and went on to study opera at both Tanglewood and the New England Conservatory. In 1959, Holgate, a bass-baritone, won second prize in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, finishing after Teresa Stratas; he went on to tour with Goldovsky's New England Opera Theater. By the early 1960s, however, Holgate had gone back to theater, only resuming a regular opera career in the 1970s. Roles like the narcissistic Miles Gloriosus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (which he originated in the show's Broadway premiere) led to him developing a reputation for what Frank Rich called "vain ladies' men." Until 2005, he worked regularly on and Off-Broadway, in regional theatre, and in LESS