Career Highlights: Bad City Blues, Acting on Impulse, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie
First Major Screen Credit: A Matter of Degrees (1990)
Biography
Judith Hoag may be most well known for playing April O'Neil in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie in 1990, but the adventurous actress wracked up long list of appearances in countless other projects both before and after that role, pursuing her interest in performing, rather than in fame. Hoag was raised in Massachusetts, where she got involved in local and school theater when she was just 13. By the time she was out of high school, she was ready to move to New York and start her career. She began playing guest roles on TV shows and in commercials, and this would prove to be the kind of work that would sustain her career for years to come. In addition to her memorable role in the Ninja Turtles movie, Hoag would go on to appear in one or two episodes of Roseanne, Murder, She Wrote, Mad About You, Melrose Place, The X-Files, ER, Carnivàle, Big Love, and many, many more. In addition to her many TV appearances, Hoag continued to act in commercials, selling everything from restaurants to copy machines. ~ Cammila Albertson, All Movie Guide
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Hoag was born Newburyport, Massachusetts. She started doing theater at a small theater in her hometown. She was only 13 when she started skipping school to go hang out at the theater, and was subsequently enrolled in a private Performing Arts High School in Natick, Massachusetts, called Walnut Hill School.
Career
Hoag moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she became involved in local theater, and later to New York, where about a month after her arrival 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.
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. She then acted in 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. 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. Then she had a small part in the 1998 blockbuster Armageddon.
Hoag 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. She next appeared in the HBO series Carnivale. Her most recent work includes the Disney Channel Halloweentown series, where she plays part-time witch, full-time mom Gwen Piper, who helps fight forces of evil. She worked on the American pilot of Wild at Heart with British singer Calvin Goldspink. However in June 2007 her part was re-cast, and she will no longer be part of the show or the CW. Most recently, Hoag played Cindy Dutton-Price in the HBO drama Big Love.