Broadway and Hollywood overlap so often that it’s easy to assume every theater star arrives with a screen résumé already started. Plenty don’t. Some of the biggest names in stage history collected their Tony Awards before they had ever stood in front of a movie camera.
The five performers below fit that pattern to varying degrees. Where the record is murky, the details are noted, so you can see what’s firmly documented and what’s a matter of definition.
Shirley Booth
Booth created the role of Lola in the stage production of Come Back, Little Sheba, and she won the Tony for Best Leading Actress in a Play for that original production. The part was a beaten down homemaker married to a recovering alcoholic, and it made her a Broadway name.
Hollywood then asked her to repeat it. Her feature film debut was the film adaptation of the play, and it earned her the Best Actress Oscar. She was also the first actress to win an Oscar and a Tony for the same role.
Liza Minnelli
Minnelli’s case comes with a footnote. In 1965, a 19 year old Liza Minnelli had a short theatre résumé and no film credits. Then she became the toast of Broadway as the title character in Kander and Ebb’s Flora, The Red Menace.
The footnote is that she made a screen debut at fourteen months old in In the Good Old Summertime. That was a baby cameo in a film her parents worked on, so most people don’t count it as a real acting role. After the Tony, she was nominated for her first Academy Award at age 23 for The Sterile Cuckoo, and she won the Oscar in 1972 for playing Sally Bowles in Cabaret.
John Lloyd Young
Young won his Tony for playing Frankie Valli in Jersey Boys. For that performance he also won Outer Critics Circle, Drama Desk and Theatre World awards. His stage credits before that included The Drawer Boy, as well as productions at the McCarter Theatre and the Kennedy Center.
His first screen job came later. In 2008, Playbill reported that he had landed a leading role in his first feature film, a comedy called Oy Vey My Son Is Gay. The cast around him included Saul Rubinek and Lainie Kazan as his parents, plus Carmen Electra and Vincent Pastore.
Daisy Eagan
Eagan’s Tony came when she was a child. In 1991 she won Best Featured Actress in a Musical for playing Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden, and at 11 she became the youngest female Tony winner in history. Her Broadway debut had been as an alternate for Young Cosette and Young Eponine in Les Misérables.
Her better known film credits arrived after the win. They include Losing Isaiah for Paramount and Ripe for Trimark, along with television work such as Square One TV. Her earliest screen appearances are thinly documented, so the safest claim is that her main film roles followed the Tony rather than preceded it.
Cynthia Erivo
Erivo’s Tony was a debut in its own right. She and Daveed Diggs won Tony Awards for their Broadway debuts in 2016. Her performance as Celie in The Color Purple won her the Tony for Best Actress in a Musical. Her screen work until then had been limited to minor roles on British television programs, including Chewing Gum and The Tunnel.
Film came in 2018, and the order of her first two movies is a small puzzle. Empire reported that her first movie role, though released second, was Belle in Widows. Bad Times at the El Royale also came out that year, directed by Drew Goddard. Her next film, Harriet, earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.
