Out Spotlight

Today’s Out Spotlight is an American actor and producer. He has been nominated for and Academy Award, received four Golden Globe nominations, an Emmy Award nomination, and a Tony Award nomination for his acting. He has received Emmy award and theater awards as an actor and as a theater producer he has won a Tony Award as a lead producer of the Broadway musical Spring Awakening. Today’s Out Spotlight is Tom Hulce.

Thomas Edward Hulce was born in Detroit, Michigan on December 6, 1953, the youngest of four children, to Joanna and Raymond Hulce. He was brought up and raised in Plymouth, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit where his father worked for the Ford Motor Company. Although he originally wanted to be a singer as a child, he switched to acting after his voice changed as a teenager. He left home at the age of 15 to attended the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan and the North Carolina School of the Arts.

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, 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, one that is one of his best known, was as good guy freshman rush Lawrence "Pinto" Kroger in National Lampoon's Animal House in 1978.

In the early 1980s, he was chosen over intense competition (which included David Bowie and Mikhail Baryshnikov) to play the role of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in director Milos Forman's film version of Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus. In 1985, he was nominated for his first Best Actor Golden Globe award and received a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance for portrayal of Mozart, losing to his co-star, F. Murray Abraham in the Oscar race. In 1989, he received his second Best Actor Golden Globe Award nomination for a critically acclaimed performance as a developmentally challenge garbage collector in the 1988 movie Dominick and Eugene. He went on to play supporting roles in such movies as Parenthood, Fearless and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

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 went on to star 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. That same year he provided both the speaking and singing voice of the protagonist Quasimodo in the Disney animated feature The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Although he largely retired from acting in the mid-1990s to focus on producing, he has had small parts in recent movies including Jumper and Stranger Than Fiction.

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 and received Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Lead Actor the role of Lt. Daniel Kaffee. Hulce received Aaron Sorkin’s screen adaptation and suggested to his agent who also represented Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer that they might be better for the role. Cruise went on to play the part on screen. In the mid-1980s, he appeared in two different productions of playwright Larry Kramer's early AIDS-era drama The Normal Heart. In 1992, he starred in a Shakespeare Theatre Company production of Hamlet. His regional theatre credits include Eastern Standard at the Seattle Repertory Theatre.

Hulce went on to become an acclaimed theater producer, including bringing 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.

He was a lead producer of the Broadway hit Spring Awakening, which won eight Tony Awards in 2007, including one for Best Musical and also won four Drama Desk Awards, while its London production won four Olivier Awards. The musical has had worldwide success and continues to be brought to the stage around the globe. Warner Bros. has announced consideration of making a movie adaptation of McG (Whose production company purchased the rights to adapt the musical) is rumored as being attached to direct.

He was 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. American Idiot won two 2010 Tony Awards: Best Scenic Design of a Musical for Christine Jones, and Best Lighting Design of a Musical for Kevin Adams. It also received a nomination for Hulce for Best Musical. Due to the success of the Broadway show, a film adaptation had been in the talks in April of 2011, the American Idiot film was confirmed. Michael Mayer, director of the Broadway musical, will be directing the film. It will be produced by Green Day, Pat Magnarella (Green Day's manager), Playtone (Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman) and Hulce.

This will not be his first film producing credit, in 2004 he brought, A Home at the End of the World, based upon Michael Cunningham's novel of the same name, starring Colin Farrell to the screen.

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, he himself debunked the rumor as completely false in a 2008 interview with The Seattle Gay News.

Andrews-Katz: In 1996, you married the Italian artist Cecilia Ermini and your daughter Anya was born in 1997. How do you respond to the many lists that place you among openly Gay actors?

Hulce: That information - having a wife and child - is false. In the world of the internet, there are many falsehoods. Anyone can write stuff on Wikipedia and it doesn't have to be true. I'm comfortable being among the lists although I stopped acting about 10 years ago. The exceptions are a brief moment in Stranger than Fiction or (what was left of my work) in Jumpers. If I found the work intriguing, I would do it again.

While on a trip up to Vancouver Island Hulce fell for the Seattle Washington area, it is there where he makes his primary home.