Alexander Woollcott, American actor, playwright, and critic (b. 1887)
Alexander Humphreys Woollcott (January 19, 1887 – January 23, 1943) was an American drama critic and commentator for The New Yorker magazine, a member of the Algonquin Round Table, an occasional actor and playwright, and a prominent radio personality.
Woollcott was the inspiration for Sheridan Whiteside, the caustic main character in the play The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939) by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, later made into a film in 1942, and for the caustic character Waldo Lydecker in the book Laura, later made into a film in 1944. Woollcott was convinced he was the inspiration for his friend Rex Stout's brilliant, eccentric detective Nero Wolfe, an idea that Stout denied.