Judith Hoag

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Judith Hoag
Born	June 29, 1968 (age 38) Newburyport, Massachusetts, United States
Spouse(s)	Vince Grant
Notable roles	April O'Neil in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Judith Hoag (b. June 29, 1968, Newburyport, Massachusetts) is an American actress and acting teacher. She is best known for portraying April O'Neil in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film. She has also co-starred in the four Disney Channel Halloweentown films.

[edit] Biography

Judith Hoag started doing theater at a small theater in her hometown of Newburyport, Massachusetts. She was only 13 when she started skipping school to go hang out at the theater. Something had to be done, so she was enrolled in a private Performing Arts High School in Natick, Massachusetts called Walnut Hill School of Performing Arts.

It was a very positive experience in spite of being "asked to leave". Judith moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts where she became involved in local theater. Finally, it was time to get serious. It was time to move to New York and find out if she could actually make a career out of this. Her mother summed it up one day by asking her "You might be afraid to go, but aren't you more afraid to stay?"

Her first job came to her about a month after she arrived. She was approached by a playwright about doing his new play The Times & Appetites of Toulouse Lautrec. Shortly thereafter she was offered the part of Lotty Bates on the soap opera Loving. She recalls her learning curve as being awkward; "yeah I was pretty awful in the beginning..."

Her contract ended after a year and a half. Next she decided to try commercials. That proved to be a successful endeavor. She has since done dozens of commercials. "Commercials are a really great way to earn money to keep you going in between the film and television jobs. They can also be a lot of fun as it usually involves a lot of improvisation. I've had directors tell me to just play and do whatever I want. That's made this process really appealing. I think commercials get a bad rap, that there's no creativity to them, but I haven't found that to be entirely true. The process of auditioning for them can be tedious but actually doing them can be really fun."

Her film work was beginning to come along. She made her first film, A Matter of Degrees, which also starred Tom Sizemore and Arye Gross. Her next film was Cadillac Man in which she co-starred with Robin Williams and Tim Robbins. It was during this time that she read for the movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. "I got this movie while I was still shooting Cadillac Man and had to fly off to North Carolina on the weekends. Everyone wondered what kind of strange movie I was off doing. Only Robin had heard of the Ninja Turtles. He had collected all of the comic books and couldn't wait to see the movie. He brought his kids to the premiere and surprised me. The movie ended up being a big hit. I still have a hard time watching that movie... I was never satisfied with how it came out. It lost a lot of it's soul. Elias Koteas, however was brilliant."

She began working bi-coastally around this time and finally the work in Los Angeles outweighed the work in New York so she and her husband, actor Vince Grant, moved west.

Judith began to shoot a series of television pilots. One of her favorite parts was on the X-Files, where she was nearly devoured by a cannibalistic mutant. "This work is never boring. I can go from pretending to live one kind of life to another to another to another. It's like a big game of dress- up and make believe. The longer I do this the more fun it gets and the freer I allow myself to be creatively."

Her most recent work includes the four ever-popular Disney Channel movies, Halloweentown. In the movies she plays part-time witch, full-time mom Gwen Piper, who helps fight forces of evil and still has a lesson for all of us.

She is now working on the American pilot of Wild at Heart with British singer Calvin Goldspink.

[edit] External link

• Judith Hoag at the Internet Movie Database