Thomas Bryant Ligon, the New Orleans born actor who built a six-decade career across Broadway stages, classic Hollywood films, and daytime television, died on June 26, 2026, in New York City. He was 85 and had long made his home in Greenwich Village.

Born on September 10, 1940, Ligon was the son of a United States Army colonel and attended St. Albans School in Washington, D.C., before enrolling at Yale University, where he graduated in 1962 as an English major. It was at Yale, in a Dramatic Association staging of Tennessee Williams's "Camino Real," that the playwright himself singled out Ligon in the role of Kilroy. That early notice helped carry the young actor to New York, where, as The Hollywood Reporter recounted, he became one of the most sought-after newcomers of the 1960s, at one point sharing a twenty-five-dollar-a-month Village sublet with the equally unknown Sam Waterston.

Broadway came quickly. Ligon made his debut in the 1963 comedy "Have I Got a Girl for You!" and took the title role in "Billy Budd" at Washington's Arena Stage the following year. In 1968 he originated the part of Orson in the off-Broadway musical "Your Own Thing," and in 1969 he appeared opposite Geraldine Page in "Angela" and alongside Sandy Duncan in "Love Is a Time of Day." The stage remained his foundation even as the screen beckoned.

In film, Ligon turned up in the 1969 musical "Paint Your Wagon" and gave one of his most enduring performances as the backup catcher Piney Woods in the 1973 baseball drama "Bang the Drum Slowly," in which he sang "Streets of Laredo." He went on to roles in "The Last American Hero," "Young Doctors in Love," and the 1989 thriller "Cutting Class," which featured a young Brad Pitt in one of his first screen parts. Ligon, Extra reported, came away convinced that the newcomer was bound for stardom.

Television audiences came to know him best as Lucas Lorenzo Prentiss on the CBS soap opera "The Young and the Restless," a role he played from 1978 to 1982. He returned to series work decades later as the inmate Alvin Yood on HBO's "Oz" from 2001 to 2003, and across the years he guest-starred on programs ranging from "Charlie's Angels" and "Starsky & Hutch" to "Dallas" and "Law & Order," with additional appearances on the soaps "Another World," "Santa Barbara," and "All My Children."

Beyond performing, Ligon gave himself to the welfare of his fellow actors. A SAG-AFTRA member for nearly sixty years, he served on the union's New York Local board, chaired its National Seniors Committee, and co-chaired the New York Seniors Committee, working on behalf of performers in the later seasons of their careers. He was preceded in death by his wife of more than thirty years, the actress and dialect coach Katharine Dunfee Clarke, known to friends as K.C., who died in 2009.

Tom Ligon belonged to a generation of working actors who moved easily between the demands of live theater, the discipline of film, and the daily rhythm of the soap stage, bringing the same care to a supporting turn as to a leading one. His was a craftsman's career, measured not by a single famous part but by the steady accumulation of memorable ones and by the loyalty he showed to the profession that became his home. He leaves behind a body of work that quietly shaped American stage and screen across more than half a century, and a reputation among colleagues as a generous actor's actor who never forgot where he began.