Tom Hulce

Tom Hulce, born Thomas Edward Hulce on December 6, 1953, in Detroit, Michigan, is an American actor and theater producer. Raised in nearby Plymouth as the youngest of four children, his mother, Joanna Winkleman, sang briefly with Phil Spitalny's All-Girl Orchestra, while his father, Raymond Albert Hulce, worked for the Ford Motor Company. As a child he aspired to be a singer, but after his voice changed during adolescence he turned to acting. He enrolled at Interlochen Arts Academy at age 15 and later attended both Beloit College and the North Carolina School of the Arts, though he did not graduate from either institution.

Hulce made his Broadway debut in 1974, appearing opposite Anthony Hopkins in Equus, a production he also performed in Los Angeles. He continued working primarily in theater through the late 1970s and early 1980s, taking occasional film roles alongside his stage work. His first film appearance came in the James Dean-influenced September 30, 1955 in 1977, followed by his role as freshman Larry "Pinto" Kroger in Animal House in 1978. In 1983 he played a gunshot victim in the television series St. Elsewhere.

His most celebrated screen performance came when he was cast as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in director Miloš Forman's 1984 film Amadeus, an adaptation of Peter Shaffer's play. Hulce was selected for the role over competition that included David Bowie, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Mark Hamill, and Kenneth Branagh. His performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in 1985, though he lost to co-star F. Murray Abraham, who acknowledged Hulce in his acceptance speech. Hulce received a Golden Globe nomination for his 1988 performance as an intellectually challenged garbage collector in Dominick and Eugene, and went on to appear in supporting roles in Parenthood in 1989, Fearless in 1993, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1994. In 1988 he played the title role in the British-Dutch film Shadow Man, directed by Piotr Andrejew. He also starred opposite Joseph Stalin's projectionist character in Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky's 1991 film The Inner Circle.

Hulce's television work earned him Emmy Award recognition on two occasions. In 1990 he received his first Emmy nomination for portraying civil rights activist Michael Schwerner in Murder in Mississippi. In 1996 he won an Emmy Award for his role as a pediatrician in the television film adaptation of Wendy Wasserstein's play The Heidi Chronicles, starring Jamie Lee Curtis. That same year he provided both the speaking and singing voice of Quasimodo in Disney's animated feature The Hunchback of Notre Dame. In 2023 he briefly reprised that role in the live-action and animated short Once Upon a Studio. Though he largely stepped back from acting in the mid-1990s, he made small appearances in Stranger Than Fiction in 2006 and Jumper in 2008.

Throughout his acting career Hulce remained active on stage. His Broadway credits include 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, A Memory of Two Mondays, and A Few Good Men, for which he received a Tony Award nomination in 1990. In the mid-1980s he appeared in two separate productions of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart. His regional theater work included Eastern Standard at the Seattle Repertory Theatre and Nothing Sacred at the Mark Taper Forum, both in 1988, as well as a 1992 production of Hamlet with the Shakespeare Theatre Company.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Hulce shifted his primary focus to stage producing and directing. Among his producing credits is a six-hour, two-evening stage adaptation of John Irving's The Cider House Rules, and Talking Heads, a festival of Alan Bennett's one-man plays that earned six Obie Awards, a Drama Desk Award, a special Outer Critics Circle Award, and a New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Foreign Play. He also produced 10 Million Miles, a musical by Keith Bunin and Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Patty Griffin, which premiered at the Atlantic Theater Company in spring 2007. As a lead producer of Spring Awakening, Hulce shared in the show's eight Tony Awards at the 2007 ceremony, including the award for Best Musical, and also received a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Musical that same year. He subsequently served as a lead producer on the stage adaptation of Green Day's American Idiot, which had its world premiere at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2009 before opening on Broadway in April 2010. In 2017 he began producing Ain't Too Proud, which went on to receive eleven Tony Award nominations in 2019. His producing work extended to film as well, including the 2004 movie A Home at the End of the World, based on Michael Cunningham's novel.

In 2008, Hulce identified as gay in an interview with Seattle Gay News, at which time he also addressed and dismissed an internet rumor that he had been married to a woman with whom he had fathered a daughter.