Samuel Atkinson "Sam" Waterston is an American actor and occasional producer and director. Among other roles, he is noted for his Academy Award-nominated portrayal of Sydney Schanberg in 1984's The Killing Fields, and his Golden Globe- and Screen Actors Guild Award-winning portrayal of Jack McCoy on the NBC television series Law & Order. He has been nominated for multiple Golden Globe-, Screen Actors Guild-, BAFTA- and Emmy Awards, having starred in over eighty film and television productions during his forty-five year career. Allmovie has characterised Waterston as having "cultivated a... loyal following with his quietly charismatic, unfailingly solid performances." In January 2010, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Waterston, the third of four siblings, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His mother, Alice Tucker , 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.
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