John Lincoln Forsythe (né Freund; January 29, 1918 – April 1, 2010) was an American stage, film/television actor, producer, narrator, drama teacher and philanthropist whose career spanned six decades.

He signed up with Warner Bros. at age 25 as a minor contract player, but he starred in The Captive City (1952) and co-starred opposite Loretta Young in It Happens Every Thursday (1953), Edmund Gwenn and Shirley MacLaine in The Trouble with Harry (1955), and Olivia de Havilland in The Ambassador's Daughter (1956).

He graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn at the age of 16, and began attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

[5] In 1936, at the age of 18, he took a job as the public address announcer for Brooklyn Dodgers games at Ebbets Field, confirming a childhood love of baseball.

He met actress Parker Worthington McCormick (December 29, 1918 – July 22, 1980), and the couple married in 1939; they had a son, Dall (born February 14, 1941), and divorced in 1943.

Leaving his movie career for service in the United States Army Air Forces in World War II, he appeared in the USAAF-produced play Winged Victory, then worked with injured soldiers who had developed speech problems.

[7] Also in 1943, Forsythe met Julie Warren, initially a theatre companion, but later a successful actress in her own right, landing a role on Broadway in Around the World.

Forsythe was cast in a 1957 episode, "Decision at Wilson's Creek", on the CBS anthology series Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theatre.

On various episodes Forsythe worked with such up-and-coming actresses as Mary Tyler Moore, Barbara Eden, Donna Douglas, Sally Kellerman, Sue Ane Langdon, and a teenage Linda Evans.

Forsythe began a 13-year association with Aaron Spelling in 1976, cast in the role of mysterious unseen millionaire private investigator Charles Townsend in the crime drama Charlie's Angels (1976–1981).

Gaining respect with the celebrity Thoroughbred circuit, he served on the board of directors at the Hollywood Park Racetrack starting in 1972, and was on the committee for more than 25 years.

[citation needed] In 1981, nearing the end of Charlie's Angels, Forsythe was selected as a last-minute replacement for George Peppard in the role of the dedicated and resilient patriarch Blake Carrington in Dynasty.

The series reunited Forsythe with one-time Bachelor Father guest star Linda Evans, who would play Blake's wife, Krystle.

During the run of the series, Forsythe, Evans and co-star Joan Collins, who played Blake's ex-wife Alexis, promoted the Dynasty line of fragrances.

[13][14] In 1992, after a three-year absence, Forsythe returned to series television starring in Norman Lear's situation comedy The Powers That Be for NBC, co-starring Holland Taylor, Peter MacNicol, Valerie Mahaffey and David Hyde Pierce.

Forsythe appeared each year to read to children during the annual Christmas program near his home at the rural resort community of Solvang, California.