Tom Hulce

Hulce 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).

Hulce debuted as an actor in 1974, playing opposite Anthony Hopkins in Equus on Broadway and in Los Angeles. Throughout the rest of the 1970s and the early 1980s, he worked primarily as a theater actor, taking occasional parts in movies.

He 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 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.

His first film role was in the James Dean-influenced film September 30, 1955 in 1977. His next movie role was as freshman college student Larry "Pinto" Kroger in the classic comedy Animal House (1978). In 1983, he played a gunshot victim in the television show St. Elsewhere.

In the early 1980s, Hulce was chosen to play the role of Mozart in director Miloš Forman's film version of Peter Shaffer's play. In 1985, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Amadeus.

In 1989, he received his second Best Actor Golden Globe Award nomination for his performance 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 largely retired from acting beginning in the mid-1990s to focus on stage directing and producing. In 2023, Hulce made a brief return to acting by reprising the role of Quasimodo in the live-action/animated short Once Upon a Studio.

Among Hulce's major projects are the 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 won 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 headed 10 Million Miles, a musical project by Keith Bunin and Grammy Award-winning 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 the 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. In 2017 he began work as a producer on the musical Ain't Too Proud, which received 11 Tony Award nominations in 2019. He also produced the 2004 movie A Home at the End of the World, based upon Michael Cunningham's novel.