UWM alum Dafoe scores fourth Academy Award nomination

UWM alum Willem Dafoe was nominated Tuesday for an Academy Award for his leading role as painter Vincent Van Gogh in the film “At Eternity’s Gate.”

The Academy Awards will be broadcast Feb. 24 on ABC. The nomination is the fourth Oscar nod for Dafoe, who first began learning the acting craft while attending UWM in the early 1970s. Dafoe was previously nominated three times for Oscars as best supporting actor, for “The Florida Project,” “Shadow of the Vampire” and “Platoon.”

This short video includes some highlights of Dafoe’s performance in this 1975 Theatre X production, “Civil Commitment Hearings.”

In the production, Dafoe appears with several young actors, many of whom studied at UWM and helped found Theatre X. The cast includes Flora Coker, Ron Gural, Arleen Kalenich, John Kishline (incorrectly credited as Kischline), Eric Schneider, John Schneider and Leslie Sharpe.

Some of the cast went on to long careers in theater. Kishline, for example, has acted in almost 200 plays across the country and overseas. John Schneider has been an actor, director, playwright and musician.

Gural has been a director and actor, directing more than 50 productions over the years. He taught at UWM, where Dafoe was one of his students. He’s now a professor emeritus of theater at Tulane University.

Coker spent three decades with Theater X and has also appeared in productions by Next Act, First Stage Children’s Theater and the Milwaukee Rep.

Read more about Willem Dafoe’s time at UWM.