Terrence Mann

Two weeks after his 1980 arrival in NYC, Terrence Mann landed his first Broadway play, "Barnum," thanks to his ability to juggle and ride a unicycle, and has seldom been far from the Great White Way since.

He donned fur for his next outing as Rum Tum Tugger, the Jaggeresque rock'n'roll feline of "Cats" (1982), and showed his true penchant for villainy as the fearsome Javert in "Les Miserables" (1987), garnering his first Tony nomination as Actor in a Musical. Perhaps his greatest triumph came as the Beast in "Disney's Beauty and the Beast" (1994), which brought him a second Tony nod as Actor in a Musical and praise from The New York Times: "Somehow, despite the masses of matted fur, the padding and the protruding incisors, he actually manages to convey the delicacy of awakening love." He appeared among Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's critically-acclaimed (but commercially-spurned) "Assassins" (1990, as Leon Czolgosz, the murderer of William McKinley) and also got to revel in his dark side as Scrooge in Madison Square Garden's "A Christmas Carol" (1995) and as the Javert-like Chauvelin in Broadway's "The Scarlet Pimpernel" (1997). Unfortunately, his second collaboration with Sondheim, the non-musical "Getting Away with Murder" (1996), failed to please even the critics.

The year after his feature debut as Larry in Richard Attenborough's disappointing film version of "A Chorus Line" (1985), Mann embarked on the "Critters" franchise, portraying an extraterrestrial bounty hunter in rock star regalia (the aliens had intercepted a music video). Though his film career has pretty much been his "Critters" work, he has fared far better on the small screen, working frequently on the soaps (including an Emmy-nominated 1987 stint on "As the World Turns" as a malevolent prisoner), appearing in his share of unsuccessful pilots and acting in TV-movies and miniseries. An early telepic, "The 10 Million Dollar Getaway" (1981), featured him as one of the gangsters who pulled off the real-life 1978 heist of Lufthansa's cargo hold at NYC's Kennedy Airport, but arguably his best work came as arch-villain toymaker Augustus P. Tavish in the CBS movie musical "Mrs. Santa Claus" (1996), which boasted songs by Jerry Herman and a starring turn by Angela Lansbury. Of late, he has branched into songwriting, co-writing the score of his pop-rock adaptation of "Romeo and Juliet" with Jerome Korman. Though the musical worked on many levels during the Mann-directed first production at Saint Paul's Ordway Music Theater in 1999, much retooling remained before it would be ready for the Great White Way.