The last time I watched “The Wizard of Oz” from start to finish was in 1962, at home, with my family. My father, Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion, was sixty-seven. I was twenty-one; my sister, Jane, was nineteen. My mother, Mildred, who never disclosed her age, was permanently thirty-nine. By then, as a way of getting to know the friendly absence who answered to the name of Dad, I was writing a biography—it was published, in 1969, as “Notes on a Cowardly Lion”—and I used any occasion with him as field work. This was the first time we’d sat down together as a family to watch the film, but not the first time a Lahr had been secretly under surveillance while viewing it. The family album had infra-red photographs of Jane and me in the mid-forties—Jane in a pinafore, me in short pants—slumped in a darkened movie house as part of a row of well-dressed, bug-eyed kids. Jane, who was five, is scrunched in the back of her seat in a state of high anxiety about the witch’s monkey henchmen. I’m trying to be a laid-back big brother: my face shows nothing, but my hands are firmly clutching the armrests.

Recently, Jane told me that for weeks afterward she’d had nightmares about lions, but what had amazed her most then was the movie’s shift from black-and-white to Technicolor, not the fact that Dad was up onscreen in a lion’s suit. Once, around that time, while waiting up till dawn for my parents to return from a costume party, I heard laughter and then a thud in the hall; I tiptoed out to discover Dad dressed in a skirt and bonnet as Whistler’s Mother, passed out on the floor. That was shocking. Dad dressed as a lion in a show was what he did for a living, and was no big deal. Our small, sunless Fifth Avenue apartment was full of Dad’s disguises, which he’d first used on stage and in which he now occasionally appeared on TV. The closet contained a woodsman’s props (axe, jodhpurs, and boots); a policeman’s suit and baton; a New York Giants baseball outfit, with cap and cleats. The drawers of an apothecary’s cabinet, which served as a wall-length bedroom bureau, held his toupées, starting pistol, monocle, putty noses, and makeup. In the living room, Dad was Louis XV, complete with sceptre and periwig, in a huge oil painting made from a poster for Cole Porter’s “Du Barry Was a Lady” (1939); in the bedroom, he was a grimacing tramp in Richard Avedon’s heartbreaking photograph of him praying, as Estragon, in “Waiting for Godot” (1956).

Over the decades, the popular memory of these wonderful stage performances has faded; the Cowardly Lion remains the enduring posthumous monument to Dad’s comic genius. While we were growing up, there was not one Oz image or memento of any kind in the apartment. (Later, at Sotheby’s, Dad acquired a first edition of L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”) The film had not yet become a cult. Occasionally, a taxi-driver or a passerby would spot Dad in the street and call out, “Put ’em up, put ’em uuuhp!” Dad would smile and tip his tweed cap, but the film’s popularity didn’t seem to mean as much to him as it did to other people.

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John Lahr is a staff writer and has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1991. A veteran of all aspects of the theatre, Lahr has contributed behind-the-scenes portraits, reviews, and Profiles, and has expanded the magazine’s drama coverage beyond Broadway to include the work of international theatre and regional companies.

A former theatre critic at The Nation, the Village Voice, and British Vogue, among other publications, Lahr has published seventeen books on theatre and two novels, “The Autograph Hound” and “Hot to Trot.” His book “Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization” won the 1992 Roger Machell Prize for best book on the performing arts. His other works include “Light Fantastic: Adventures in Theatre,” (1996) and “Show and Tell: New Yorker Profiles” (2000). In 2001, he edited “The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan.” His expanded New Yorker article on Frank Sinatra was made into a book with photographs, “Frank Sinatra: The Artist and the Man.” Lahr’s book “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh” was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.

Lahr served as literary adviser to the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis in 1968, and as adviser to the Vivian Beaumont Theatre from 1969 to 1971. He was the co-producer of the 1987 film “Prick Up Your Ears,” based on his Joe Orton biography of the same title, and was the editor of “The Orton Diaries.” Lahr has also written numerous movie scripts. His short film “Sticky My Fingers . . . Fleet My Feet,” directed by John Hancock, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1971.

Lahr is a two-time winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. In 1968, he became the prize’s youngest recipient; he was honored again in 1993. Lahr has written many stage adaptations, which have been performed in England and the United States, including:“Accidental Death of an Anarchist,” “The Manchurian Candidate,” “The Bluebird of Unhappiness: A Woody Allen Revue,” and “Diary of a Somebody,” which began at the Royal National Theatre, played the West End, and later toured England. He co-created, with Elaine Strich, the Tony Award-winning “Elaine Stritch at Liberty,” which won the 2002 Drama Desk Award for outstanding book of a musical. Lahr was the first drama critic to win a Tony Award.

Lahr is the son of the comedian Bert Lahr, whom he wrote about in his biography “Notes on a Cowardly Lion.”