He appeared in the films Paint Your Wagon, Jump, and Bang the Drum Slowly (in which he also sang the title song) as well as the television series The Young and the Restless, and Oz.

Mentored by folksinger and actor Gordon Heath in Paris, beginning in the mid 1950s, Ligon then attended St. Albans School (Washington, D.C.), where he suffered a broken leg while playing football, and, sans sports, his interests turned solidly toward theater.

Tom Ligon created the role of Orson in the prize-winning Off-Broadway musical Your Own Thing (1968), and starred on Broadway opposite Geraldine Page in Angela, by Sumner Arthur Long, and with Sandy Duncan in John Patrick's Love is a Time of Day.

Other noteworthy appearances on the New York stage include Geniuses, BAFO (Best and Final Offer), Den of Thieves, The Golf Ball, Tartuffe: Born Again, A Backer's Audition, Another Paradise, and Have I Got A Girl for You.

In August 2013, when Ligon was age 72, The New York Times[1] reported that he sent an intruder tumbling to the pavement below with a fist to the forehead and a ninja shout after the man had entered his Greenwich Village apartment through a window.