He was 95 years old.
Holbrook has played iconic author Mark Twain at solo shows for more than six decades, winning a Tony Award for best actor in 1966 for his role in “Mark Twain Tonight!” that he also directed.
He presented the show across the country and in Europe, becoming synonymous with the famous comedian.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a vaudeville artist mother and a shoe sales father, Holbrook and his brothers were raised by their grandparents in South Weymouth, Massachusetts.
Sent to boarding school as a young man and later to the military school, he found solace in the costumes and characters he portrayed in the theater club.
Holbrook came up with the idea of doing Twain’s show after portraying the author as part of a project of honor as a major drama at Denison University in Granville, Ohio.
While serving in the Army during World War II, he served in amateur theater productions, including “Madam Precious” while stationed in Newfoundland.
It was there that he met his first wife, actress Ruby Johnston, whom he married in 1945.
Back home, Holbrook got a steady performance in the daytime soap “The Brighter Day” and continued to perform on Twain.
Ed Sullivan later attended a performance by him and invited Holbrook to appear on his variety show in 1956.
Holbrook’s career on stage and on screen was prodigious.
He made his Broadway debut in 1961 in “Do you know the Milky Way?” and the Great White Way would become a family home for him, as it has appeared in several productions over the years, including “Man of La Mancha”, “An American Daughter” and – of course – “Mark Twain Tonight”.
He innovated on the small screen with the 1972 television movie, “That Certain Summer”, in which he played a divorced father who presents himself as a gay man.
Holbrook appeared in several other TV productions, such as the NBC miniseries “Lincoln”, which won him an Emmy in 1976, and the 1980s sitcom “Designing Women”, starring his then wife, Dixie Carter.
His marriage to his first wife ended in divorce in 1965. The following year, he married actress Carol Eve Rossen.
They divorced in 1983 and in 1984 he married Carter and remained married to her until his death due to complications from endometrial cancer in 2010.
He also found success in the films.
Holbrook’s role as “Deep Throat” in the 1976 political movie “All the President’s Men” gave the audience something to hang on to, as it was the real source who advised Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward (played by Robert Redford in film) in what become the Watergate scandal.
In 2008, his Oscar nomination for best supporting actor for his role as a retired widower in “Into the Wild” made Holbrook, then 82, the oldest performer to be nominated in that category at the time.
But it was Twain who Holbrook returned to again and again.