(born 1968). Australian performer Hugh Jackman became a successful actor, dancer, and singer. He was perhaps best known for his action movies and stage musicals.
Hugh Michael Jackman was born on October 12, 1968, in Sydney, Australia. He made his acting debut in a production of Camelot when he was just five years old. In 1991 he graduated from the University of Technology, Sydney, with a degree in communications and then began working temporary jobs to pay for classes at the Actors Centre Australia. He next refined his acting skills at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in suburban Perth. Shortly after graduating from there in 1994, he landed a role in the 10-part TV prison drama Correlli (1995). In 1996 he took to the stage, scoring the lead in the Australian premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical adaptation of Billy Wilder’s film noir classic Sunset Boulevard. That performance led Jackman to the Royal National Theatre in London, England, where he won a role in a revival of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Oklahoma! (1998).
Jackman next turned to film, making his Hollywood debut in X-Men (2000), in which his portrayal of the tortured antihero Wolverine established him as an action star. He demonstrated his range with a pair of romantic comedies, Someone like You (2001) and Kate & Leopold (2001), before once again portraying Wolverine in X2 (2003). Jackman made his Broadway debut in 2003 as singer-songwriter Peter Allen in the biographical musical The Boy from Oz. Jackman’s flamboyantly spot-on performance won him a Tony Award in 2004. In addition, he hosted the Tony Awards show in 2003–05.
An established star both in Hollywood and on Broadway, Jackman returned to the big screen with the ambitious science-fiction romance The Fountain (2006) and the dramatic thriller The Prestige (2006), as well as X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). In 2008 he starred opposite Nicole Kidman in the historical epic Australia, in which his performance was widely praised. As host of the Academy Awards ceremony in 2009, he showcased his skills as a premier song-and-dance man. Later that year he reprised his role as Wolverine in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and appeared in the Broadway play A Steady Rain. In the sports-action film Real Steel (2011), Jackman portrayed a promoter in the futuristic milieu of robot boxing. He then had a supporting role in Butter (2011), a political satire centered on a Midwestern butter-sculpting contest, and he provided the voice of an Australian-accented Easter Bunny in the animated Rise of the Guardians (2012). Jackman’s performance in a 2012 film adaptation of the stage musical Les Misérables earned him a Golden Globe Award.
Jackman continued to entertain live audiences with a hugely popular one-man concert show, Hugh Jackman, Back on Broadway (2011). In 2012 he received a special Tony Award for his varied contributions to the Broadway theater community.
