| Tom Hulce | |
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Tom Hulce, December 2006 |
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| Born | December 6, 1953 Detroit, Michigan, USA |
| Occupation | Actor and Producer |
| Years active | 1975–present |
Thomas Edward "Tom" Hulce ( /ˈhʊls/; born December 6, 1953) is an American actor and theater producer. As an actor, he is perhaps best known for his Oscar-nominated portrayal of Mozart in the movie Amadeus and his role as "Pinto" in National Lampoon's Animal House. Additional acting awards included a total of four Golden Globe nominations, an Emmy Award, and a Tony Award nomination. Hulce retired from acting in the mid-1990s in order to focus upon stage directing and producing.[1] In 2007, he won a Tony Award as a lead producer of the Broadway musical Spring Awakening.
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Hulce was born in Detroit, Michigan (some sources incorrectly say Whitewater, Wisconsin[2]). The youngest of four children,[3] he was raised in Plymouth, Michigan. His mother, Joanna (née Winkleman), sang briefly with Phil Spitalny's All-Girl Orchestra, and his father, Raymond Albert Hulce, worked for the Ford Motor Company.[4][5][6] Although he originally wanted to be a singer as a child, he switched to acting after his voice changed during his teenage years.[7] He left home at the age of 15 and attended Interlochen Arts Academy and the North Carolina School of the Arts.[8]
Hulce made his acting debut in 1975, playing opposite Anthony Perkins in Equus on Broadway. Throughout the rest of the 1970s and the early 1980s, he worked primarily as a theater actor,[9] taking occasional parts in movies. His first film role was in the James Dean-influenced film September 30, 1955 in 1977. His next movie role was as freshman student Lawrence "Pinto" Kroger in the highly popular National Lampoon's Animal House (1978). In 1982, he played a gunshot victim in the television show St. Elsewhere.
In the early 1980s, Hulce was chosen over intense competition (which included David Bowie and Mikhail Baryshnikov[10]) to play the role of Mozart in director Milos Forman's film version of Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus. In 1985, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance, losing to his co-star, F. Murray Abraham. In 1989, he received his second Best Actor Golden Globe Award nomination for a critically acclaimed performance [11] as a retarded garbage collector in the 1988 movie Dominick and Eugene. He played supporting roles in Parenthood (1989), Fearless (1993) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994).
In 1990, he was nominated for his first Emmy Award for his performance as the 1960s civil rights activist Michael Schwerner in the 1990 TV-movie Murder in Mississippi. He starred as Joseph Stalin's projectionist in Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky's 1991 film The Inner Circle. In 1996, he won an Emmy Award for his role as a gay pediatrician in a television-movie version of the Wendy Wasserstein play The Heidi Chronicles, starring Jamie Lee Curtis. Also in 1996, he provided both the speaking and singing voice of the protagonist Quasimodo for the Disney animated feature The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Although Hulce largely retired from acting in the mid-1990s, he had bit parts in the recent movies Jumper (2008) and Stranger Than Fiction (2006).
Hulce remained active in theater throughout his entire acting career. In addition to Equus, he also appeared in Broadway productions of A Memory of Two Mondays and A Few Good Men, for which he was a Tony Award nominee in 1990. In the mid-1980s, he appeared in two different productions of playwright Larry Kramer's early AIDS-era drama The Normal Heart.[12] In 1992, he starred in a Shakespeare Theatre Company production of Hamlet.[13] His regional theatre credits include Eastern Standard at the Seattle Repertory Theatre.[14]
Hulce shepherded two major projects to fruition: the six-hour, two-evening stage adaptation of John Irving's The Cider House Rules, and Talking Heads, a festival of Alan Bennett's plays which won six Obie Awards, a Drama Desk Award, a special Outer Critics Circle Award, and a New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. He also headed 10 Million Miles, a musical project by Keith Bunin and Grammy Award-nominated singer-songwriter Patty Griffin, that premiered in Spring 2007 at the Atlantic Theater Company.
Hulce was a lead producer of the Broadway hit Spring Awakening, which won eight Tony Awards in 2007, including one for Best Musical. He is also a lead producer of a stage adaptation of the Green Day album American Idiot. The musical had its world premiere in Berkeley, California, at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2009 and opened on Broadway in April 2010. He also produced the 2004 movie A Home at the End of the World, based upon Michael Cunningham's novel.
For many years, Hulce was the subject of unsubstantiated and unsourced rumors that he had married an Italian artist named Cecilia Ermini, with whom he had a daughter. Although this was repeated as fact on many websites, including imdb.com, Hulce himself debunked the rumor as completely false in a 2008 interview with The Seattle Gay News.[15] Hulce has never been married and has no children. He currently resides in New York.
2010 Tony Award Best Musical American Idiot [nominee] Produced by Tom Hulce
2010 Drama Desk Award Outstanding Musical American Idiot [nominee] Produced by Tom Hulce
2007 Tony Award Best Musical Spring Awakening [winner] Produced by Tom Hulce
2007 Drama Desk Award Outstanding Musical Spring Awakening [winner] Produced by Tom Hulce
2003 Drama Desk Award Outstanding New Play Tom Hulce [nominee] (for Talking Heads )
2000 Drama Desk Award Outstanding Director of a Play Thomas Hulce [nominee] ( for "The Cider House Rules, Part One" )
1993 Helen Hayes Award Outstanding Lead Actor, Resident Play [nominee] (for Hamlet, The Shakespeare Theatre)
1990 Tony Award Best Actor in Play [nominee] (for A Few Good Men)
1990 Helen Hayes Award Outstanding Lead Actor, Non-Resident Play [nominee] (for A Few Good Men)
Film/Television awards:
See Filmography below
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