The eldest of three children, Forsythe was born as Jacob Lincoln Freund on January 29, 1918, in Penns Grove, New Jersey, to Blanche Materson (née Blohm) and Samuel Jeremiah Freund. Blanche was born in Pennsylvania, to David Hyat Blohm, a Russian Jewish immigrant, and to Mary S. Materson, who was born in Maryland, to Jewish immigrants from Prussia. Samuel was a stockbroker born in New York to Polish Jewish immigrants.  He was raised in Brooklyn, where his father worked as a Wall Street businessman during the Great Depression of the 1930s. 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. In 1936 at the age of eighteen, he took a job as the public address announcer for Brooklyn Dodgers games at Ebbets Field, confirming a childhood love of baseball.

Despite showing initial reluctance, Forsythe began an acting career at the suggestion of his father. He met actress Parker McCormick (December 1918 – July 1980), and the couple married in 1939; they had a son, Dall (born in 1943), and divorced in 1943. As a bit player for Warner Brothers, Forsythe successfully appeared in several small parts. As a result he was given a small role in Destination Tokyo (1943). Leaving his movie career for service in the United States Army Air Corps in World War II, he appeared in the U.S. Army Air Corps play and film Winged Victory, then worked with injured soldiers who had developed speech problems.  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. Warren became Forsythe’s second wife and in the early 1950s the marriage produced two daughters – Page and Brooke. In 1947, Forsythe joined the initial class of the soon-to-be prestigious Actors Studio, where he met other promising young actors including Marlon Brando and Julie Harris. During this time he appeared on Broadway in Mister Roberts and The Teahouse of the August Moon.  In 1955 Alfred Hitchcock cast Forsythe in the movie The Trouble with Harry, with Shirley MacLaine in her first movie appearance, for which she won a Golden Globe.

Throughout the 1950s, Forsythe successfully appeared in the new medium and worked regularly on all the networks, especially as a guest star. For example, during this period, he appeared on the popular anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents in an episode titled “Premonition” opposite Cloris Leachman. Forsythe also starred in an episode of the CBS Western anthology series Zane Grey Theatre titled Decision at Wilson’s Creek, which premiered May 17, 1957. Outdoor location sequences for the episode were shot on the Iverson Movie Ranch in Chatsworth, Calif., where a number of scenes took place in a group of oak trees on the Upper Iverson that later came to be known as the Midway Oaks. One of those oak trees, a distinctive multi-trunked tree with a characteristic lean, became known as the Forsythe Oak, commemorating John Forsythe’s appearance at the fabled movie ranch, considered the most widely filmed outdoor location in movie and television history. The Forsythe Oak remains in place today, located on a private estate on the former Upper Iverson.

In 1957, he took a leading role in the situation comedy Bachelor Father for CBS as Bentley Gregg, a playboy lawyer who has to become a father to his niece Kelly (played by Noreen Corcoran), upon the death of her biological parents. The show was an immediate ratings hit and moved to NBC the following season and to ABC in the fall of 1961. 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 teenaged Linda Evans. During the 1961 season, Bachelor Father moved to ABC, but was cancelled that season due to declining ratings.  In the early 1960s, Forsythe returned to acting in movies including Kitten with a Whip (1964), Madame X (1966) and In Cold Blood (1967). In 1964 he starred in the made for TV Movie See How They Run which is notable for being the first movie made for television. He also attempted two new television programs: The John Forsythe Show on NBC with Guy Marks, Elsa Lanchester, Ann B. Davis, Peggy Lipton, and Forsythe’s two young daughters, Page and Brooke (1965–1966), and To Rome with Love on CBS (1969–1971) with co-star Walter Brennan. Between 1971 and 1977, Forsythe served as narrator on the syndicated nature series, The World of Survival. He was also the announcer for Michelob beer commercials from the 70s through about 1985, notably during the “Weekends were made for Michelob” era.

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).  On every episode, Forsythe, as Townsend, is heard over a speaker phone, instructing the eponymous Angels on their mission for the episode. Character actor David Doyle played Charlie’s on-screen liaison to the Angels, who in later seasons included Cheryl Ladd, Shelley Hack, and Tanya Roberts. Charlie’s Angels was a huge success, and was shown in more than 90 countries.

Forsythe became the highest paid actor on television on a per-hour basis: while the show’s on-camera stars often worked 15-hour days five days a week, with a couple of hours just for hair and makeup, Forsythe’s lines for an entire episode would be recorded in a sound studio in a matter of minutes, after which he would have lunch in the network’s commissary and then head for the track. During this period, Forsythe invested a lot of money in thoroughbred racing, a personal hobby. 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.  Following heart problems, Forsythe underwent quadruple coronary artery bypass surgery in 1979. This was so successful that he not only returned to work on Charlie’s Angels, he also appeared in the two-time Academy Award-nominated motion picture …And Justice for All later that year as Judge Henry T. Fleming, the film’s main antagonist, an evil corrupt judge who despises Al Pacino’s lawyer character.

In 1981, nearing the end of Charlie’s Angels, Forsythe was selected as a last-minute replacement for George Peppard in the role of conniving patriarch Blake Carrington in Dynasty. Another Aaron Spelling production, Dynasty was ABC’s answer to the highly successful CBS series Dallas. Between 1985 and 1987, Forsythe also appeared as Blake Carrington in the short-lived spinoff series The Colbys.  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 another co-star Joan Collins, who played Blake’s ex-wife Alexis, promoted the Dynasty line of fragrances. Dynasty came to an end in 1989, after a total of nine seasons. Forsythe was the only actor to appear in all 220 episodes.  Forsythe was nominated for Emmy Awards three times between 1982 and 1984 for “Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series” but did not win. He was also nominated six times for Golden Globe Awards, winning twice. He was nominated five times for the Soap Opera Digest Awards, also winning twice.

Linda Evans who said in a 2012 interview with Halli Casser Jayne, about Forsythe, if he had a pretty good memory off- the Dynasty set: “When I did meet him in Bachelor Father it was a show called ‘Crush on Bentley,’ and his niece that was ‘The Bachelor Father,’ of and I were the same age, 15 years old (Noreen Corcoran). We did the show and I had a crush on Bentley, and in the end, he fixes me up with these football players, and it was so sweet getting to know him, then, and he signed my script, because it was my first speaking part and he put on it, ‘Linda, you’re going to be somebody someday and I found it when I was doing Dynasty,’ and brought on the set and say, ‘See John, you were psychic, you knew this was going to happen.’ It was so easy when I saw him when I walked on the set of Dynasty. He looked at me and he said, ‘Mine Linda Evans, did how you’re grown and how’s your mother, Arlene?’ And he remembered my mother’s name. He remembered my real name – which is Evanstad. MGM Studios later changed it to Evans. I said, ‘Oh John, it’s going to be so easy to love you in this part and it was Heaven to work with him, absolute Heaven, he had the most delicious sense of humor. He would make me laugh, all day long and we had so much drama, and on the script of Dynasty, and fights and things that we had to do with people, and he would constantly just joking/laughing, saying, ‘Come on, you can do this?,’ And we have to go out to get some awards and I was afraid to get up and in-front of people, when I was in junior high school – from that day, I was so shy and get up to do a book report, and he would encourage me and take my hand and walk up with me, he was extraordinary. We remained friends until he died, I talked to him like 3 weeks before he passed, and we talked all the time.”

Forsythe’s wife of 51 years, Julie Warren (October 20, 1919 — August 15, 1994), died at the age of 74, in her hospital room, after Forsythe made the decision to turn off her life-support system. She had been in a coma following severe breathing difficulties. In July 2002, Forsythe married businesswoman Nicole Carter (May 27, 1941 – May 11, 2010) at Ballard Country Church; they remained married until his death. Forsythe is survived by his son, two daughters, six grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.  Forsythe reprised his role as Charlie for the film version of Charlie’s Angels (2000) and its sequel Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003), but then retired from acting. Besides spending time with his family, he enjoyed ownership of an art gallery. In 2005 actor Bartholomew John portrayed Forsythe in Dynasty: The Making of a Guilty Pleasure, a fictionalized television movie based on the creation and behind the scenes production of Dynasty.

On May 2, 2006, Forsythe appeared with Dynasty co-stars Linda Evans, Joan Collins, Pamela Sue Martin, Al Corley, Gordon Thomson and Catherine Oxenberg in Dynasty Reunion: Catfights & Caviar. The one-hour reunion special of the former ABC series aired on CBS. Forsythe appeared each year to read to children during the annual Christmas program near his home at the rural resort community of Solvang, California.  Forsythe was treated for colorectal cancer in the fall of 2006. Surgery was reportedly successful and his cancer was considered to be in remission.  Forsythe died on April 1, 2010, from pneumonia in Santa Ynez, California, at the age of 92. His widow, Nicole, died five weeks later. He was interred at Oak Hill Cemetery in Santa Barbara, California.