Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play

The Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play is an honor presented at the Tony Awards, a ceremony established in 1947 as the Antoinette Perry Awards for Excellence in Theatre, to actors for quality leading roles in a Broadway play.

The awards are named after Antoinette Perry, an American actress who died in 1946.

Honors in several categories are presented at the ceremony annually by the Tony Award Productions, a joint venture of The Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing, to "honor the best performances and stage productions of the previous year.

It was first presented to José Ferrer and Fredric March at the 1st Tony Awards for their portrayals of Cyrano De Bergerac and Clinton Jones in Cyrano de Bergerac and Years Ago, respectively.

Brian Bedford and Jason Robards are tied with the most nominations, with a total of seven.

José Ferrer won twice for Cyrano de Bergerac (1947) and The Shrike (1952)
Fredric March won twice Years Ago (1947) and in Long Day's Journey into Night (1957)
Henry Fonda won for Mister Roberts (1948)
Sidney Blackmer won for Come Back, Little Sheba in 1950
Paul Muni won for Inherit the Wind (1956)
Ralph Bellamy won for Sunrise at Campobello (1958)
Jason Robards won for The Disenchanted (1959)
Melvyn Douglas won for The Best Man (1960)
Zero Mostel won for Rhinoceros (1961)
Paul Scofield won for A Man for All Seasons (1963)
Alec Guinness won for Dylan (1964)
Walter Matthau won for The Odd Couple (1965)
Martin Balsam won for You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running (1968)
James Earl Jones won for The Great White Hope (1969) and for Fences (1987)
Alan Bates won twice, for Butley (1973) and Fortune's Fool (2002)
Al Pacino won for The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1977)
Ian McKellen won for Amadeus (1981)
Harvey Fierstein won for Torch Song Trilogy (1983)
Jeremy Irons won for The Real Thing (1984)
Derek Jacobi won for Much Ado About Nothing (1985)
Judd Hirsch won twice for I'm Not Rappaport (1986) and Conversations with My Father (1992)
Robert Morse won Tru (1990)
Ralph Fiennes for Hamlet (1995)
Christopher Plummer won for Barrymore (1997)
Brian Dennehy won twice for Death of a Salesman (1999) and Long Days Journey into Night (2003)
Jefferson Mays won for I Am My Own Wife in 2004
Bill Irwin won for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (2005)
Richard Griffiths won for The History Boys in 2006
Frank Langella won twice for his roles in Frost/Nixon (2007) and The Father (2016)
Mark Rylance won for Boeing-Boeing (2008), and Jerusalem (2011)
Geoffrey Rush won for Exit the King in 2009
Denzel Washington won for Fences (2010)
James Corden won for One Man, Two Guvnors (2012)
Tracy Letts won for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (2013)
Bryan Cranston has won the award twice, for All the Way (2014) and Network (2019)
Kevin Kline won for Present Laughter in 2017
Andrew Garfield won for Angels in America in 2018
Simon Russell Beale won for The Lehman Trilogy (2021)
Sean Hayes won for Good Night, Oscar (2023)
Jeremy Strong won for An Enemy of the People (2024)