Partner Derek Anson Jones, Husband
Hugo Redwood
Queer Places:
Northwestern University, 633 Clark St, Evanston, IL 60208
Denis Patrick Seamus O'Hare (born January 16, 1962) is an American actor noted
for his award winning performances in Take Me Out and Sweet Charity as well as
the HBO television show True Blood. He is also known for his supporting roles in
the films Charlie Wilson's War, Milk, and Changeling and Dallas Buyers Club,
playing doctors in both. In 2011 he starred as Larry Harvey and in 2013 Spalding
in the FX series American Horror Story and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy
Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie.
O'Hare came out as gay while a student at Brother Rice High School (Michigan).
O'Hare is married to Hugo Redwood and the couple have a son. "We got married
because we could. It’s not sexy," Redwood explained. "City Hall’s like the DMV
-- we stood in line with a lot of Eastern Europeans. A lot of the impetus for
doing it was because, if we weren’t married, then we’d have to go through two
rounds of adoption. I would be Declan’s father, and then Denis would have to
adopt him. This way, it’s neat and clean. Now I’m a married man with child."
In 1992 O'Hare arrived to New York in John Logan’s play “Hauptmann” and 1994
he met Derek Anson Jones, with whom
he lived and bought an apartment in Brooklyn. On January 17, 2000, Jones, who
became a successful director, died of AIDS. Jones had told O’Hare he was H.I.V.
positive two weeks after they met. “I thought about it and decided you don’t
get to pick who you love,” said O’Hare. About five months after Jones’s death,
O’Hare met Redwood. They met, O’Hare told Sanford Marcus on the blog Queer
Sighted, in a chat room on AOL, from which he was booted after he sent Redwood
an X-rated photograph of himself.
“You send the picture with the information you need,” O’Hare said, adding that
he sent the photo a month after they began chatting. “We’re gay men. How else
do you meet? It’s: ‘What do you got? Cool, I can work with that.’ ”
“He shows up in a black Town Car, in black ribbed sweater and architect
glasses. I thinking, I’m not ready for someone this stylish. I just wanted to
have a little fun, and he looked so daunting. Then he sees the buzzer, my name
is on it and Derek Jones. He goes, ‘Oh, the cat’s away, the mouse will play.’
He wouldn’t let it go. He said, ‘Where’s Derek tonight?’ I said, ‘He’s dead.’
Without a pause Hugo says, ‘That’s a buzz killer,’ and I thought, this is
going to be just fine.”
Denis O'Hare was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in the suburbs of
Detroit, living in Southfield until he was 15, when his family moved to Wing
Lake in Bloomfield Hills. His mother is a musician and he grew up playing the
church organ.
As a teenager, O'Hare was in his school's choir and in 1974 he went to his
first audition, gaining a chorus part in a community theatre production of
Show Boat.
In 1980, O'Hare left Detroit for Chicago to study theatre at Northwestern
University.
O'Hare won a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play for
his performance in Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out, where his character's
lengthy monologues in which he slowly falls in love with the game of baseball
were considered the main reason for his award. He won the 2005 Drama Desk
Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical for his role as Oscar
Lindquist in the Broadway revival of Sweet Charity.
In 2004 he played Charles J. Guiteau in the Broadway production of
Stephen
Sondheim's Assassins, for which he was nominated for the Best Performance by a
Featured Actor in a Musical Tony Award. He lost to co-star Michael Cerveris
who played John Wilkes Booth. Before appearing in those shows, he appeared on
Broadway in the 1998 revival of Cabaret, in which he played Ernst Ludwig
onstage and the clarinet in the show's orchestra, the "Kit Kat Band".
O'Hare was featured in the Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation of Saint Maybe.
He has appeared as a guest star on several episodes of Law & Order and its
spin-offs, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Law & Order: Criminal Intent.
In 2008, he has appeared as a guest star on several episodes of Brothers &
Sisters. His feature film credits include The Anniversary Party, 21 Grams,
Garden State, Derailed, Michael Clayton, A Mighty Heart, Half Nelson, Milk,
Edge of Darkness, Charlie Wilson's War and Changeling.
In 2009, O'Hare portrayed Phillip Steele (an amalgam character based on
Quentin Crisp's friends Phillip Ward and Tom Steele) in a television biopic on
Crisp entitled An Englishman in New York. The same year he played therapist
Dr. David Worth in the series Bored to Death (episode 1.3).
In 2010, O'Hare joined the cast of HBO's True Blood in its third season as
Russell Edgington, the vampire king of Mississippi who is 2,800 years old. In
2011, he appeared in the film The Eagle as a Roman officer named Lutorius.
Recently he has appeared in a recurring role as Judge Charles Abernathy on the
television drama series The Good Wife. O'Hare co-starred as Larry Harvey in
FX's American Horror Story.
In 2012, O'Hare starred alongside Amy Adams and Donna Murphy as the Baker in
Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods at The Public Theater. The production played
at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, NYC from July 23 to September 1,
2012.
In July 2013, it was announced that O'Hare would be in American Horror Story:
Coven.
My published books:
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- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_O%27Hare