TOM HULCE & HIS WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART ROLE

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Tom Hulce, the American actor well-known by his role of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Miloš Forman's film Amadeus, who was born on a day like today in 1953.

Thomas Edward Hulce (born December 6, 1953) is an American actor and theater producer.

He is best known for his portrayal of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the Academy Award-winning film Amadeus (1984), as well as the roles of Larry "Pinto" Kroger in Animal House (1978), Larry Buckman in Parenthood (1989), and Quasimodo in Disney's animated film The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996).

Awards include an Emmy Award for The Heidi Chronicles, a Tony Award for Spring Awakening, an Oscar Award nomination for Best Actor for Amadeus, and four Golden Globe nominations. He retired from acting in the mid-1990s to focus on stage directing and producing.

In 2007, he won the Tony Award for Best Musical as a lead producer of Spring Awakening.

Thomas Edward Hulce was born on December 6, 1953 in Detroit, Michigan. 

The youngest of four children, he was raised in Plymouth, Michigan. His mother, the former Joanna Winkleman, sang briefly with Phil Spitalny's All-Girl Orchestra, and his father, Raymond Albert Hulce, worked for the Ford Motor Company.

As a child, he wanted to be a singer, but he switched to acting after his voice changed in his teenage years. He left home at the age of 15 and attended Interlochen Arts Academy and the North Carolina School of the Arts, leaving a year before finishing his BFA. He graduated with a BA from Beloit College in Wisconsin.

Hulce debuted as an actor in 1975, playing opposite Anthony Hopkins 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 was as freshman student Lawrence "Pinto" Kroger in the classic comedy Animal House (1978). 

In 1983, he played a gunshot victim in the television show St. Elsewhere.

More information: All About Actors

In the early 1980s, Hulce was chosen over intense competition (including David Bowie, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Mark Hamill, and Kenneth Branagh) to play the role of Mozart in director Miloš 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 his acceptance speech, Abraham paid tribute to his co-star, saying, There's only one thing missing for me tonight, and that is to have Tom Hulce standing by my side.

In 1989, he received his second Best Actor Golden Globe Award nomination for a critically acclaimed performance as an intellectually-challenged 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 1988, he played the title part in the British–Dutch movie Shadow Man, directed by the Polish director Piotr Andrejew.

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 pediatrician in a television-movie version of the Wendy Wasserstein play The Heidi Chronicles, starring Jamie Lee Curtis. Also that year, he was cast in Disney's animated film adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, providing the speaking and singing voice of the protagonist Quasimodo. Although Hulce largely retired from acting in the mid-1990s, he had bit parts in the movies Stranger Than Fiction (2006) and Jumper (2008).

Hulce remained active in theater throughout his entire acting career. In addition to Equus, he 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.

In 1992, he starred in a Shakespeare Theatre Company production of Hamlet. His regional theatre credits include Eastern Standard at the Seattle Repertory Theatre and Nothing Sacred at the Mark Taper Forum, both in 1988.

More information: Backstage

Amadeus is a 1984 American period biographical drama film directed by Miloš Forman and adapted by Peter Shaffer from his 1979 stage play Amadeus. 

Set in Vienna, Austria, during the latter half of the 18th century, the film is a fictionalized story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart from the time he left Salzburg, described by its writer as a fantasia on the theme of Mozart and Salieri. 

Mozart's music is heard extensively in the soundtrack. The film follows a fictional rivalry between Mozart and Italian composer Antonio Salieri at the court of Emperor Joseph II. The film stars F. Murray Abraham as Salieri and Tom Hulce as Mozart. Abraham and Hulce were both nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, with Abraham winning.

Amadeus was released by Orion Pictures on September 19, 1984, thirteen days following its world premiere in Los Angeles on September 6, 1984. Upon release, it received widespread acclaim and was a box office hit, grossing over $90 million. 

Considered by many to be one of the greatest films of all time, Amadeus was nominated for 53 awards and received 40, including eight Academy Awards (including the Academy Award for Best Picture), four BAFTA Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, and a Directors Guild of America award.

As of 2021, it was the most recent film to have more than one nomination in the Academy Award for Best Actor category.

In 1998, the American Film Institute ranked it 53rd on its 100 Years... 100 Movies list. 

n 2019, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.

More information: Rogert Ebert

Teachers don't tell us the truth about historical people.
If we knew the truth, parents couldn't hold their lives up as examples.

Tom Hulce