He was 95.
Holbrook portrayed iconic author Mark Twain in one-man shows for over six decades and won a Tony Award for Best Actor in 1966 for his performance in “Mark Twain Tonight!” which he also directed.
He played the show all over the country and in Europe and became synonymous with the famous humorist.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, to a vaudeville performer, mother and shoe salesman father, Holbrook and his siblings were raised by his grandparents in South Weymouth, Massachusetts.
Sent to boarding school as a youth, and later to military school, he found solace in the costumes and characters he portrayed in the drama club.
Holbrook first got the idea of doing the Twain show after portraying the author as part of an honors project as an associate professor of drama at Denison University in Granville, Ohio.
While serving in the military during World War II, he performed in amateur theater productions including “Madam Precious” while stationed in Newfoundland.
There he met his first wife, actress Ruby Johnston, whom he married in 1945.
Back home, Holbrook got a regular acting appearance on the daytime soap opera “The Brighter Day” and continued to perform his Twain show.
Ed Sullivan later caught a performance of it and invited Holbrook to his variety show in 1956.
Holbrook’s career on stage and on screen has been a miraculous one.
He made his Broadway debut in 1961 in “Do You Know the Milky Way?” and the Great White Way would become a familiar home to him as he appeared in numerous productions over the years, including ‘Man of La Mancha’, ‘An American Daughter’ and – of course – ‘Mark Twain Tonight’.
He broke ground on the small screen with the 1972 television movie “That Certain Summer”, in which he played a divorced father who comes out as a gay man.
Holbrook appeared in several other TV productions, such as the NBC miniseries “Lincoln,” which earned him an Emmy in 1976, and the 1980s sitcom “Designing Women,” with 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 her death from complications from endometrial cancer in 2010.
He also found success in movies.
Holbrook’s role as ‘Deep Throat’ in the 1976 political film ‘All the President’s Men’ gave audiences something to hang their hats as the factual source advising Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward (played by Robert Redford in the film) in what has 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 the then 82-year-old Holbrook the oldest artist to ever be nominated in that category.
But it was Twain who came back to Holbrook over and over.