Adam Garcia

1973-06-01 · Wahroonga, New South Wales, Australia

Adam Garcia is an Australian actor who is best known for lead roles in musicals such as Saturday Night Fever and Kiss Me, Kate. He is also a trained tap dancer and singer. Garcia has been nominated twice at the Laurence Olivier Awards in 1999 and 2013. Garcia is the son of Jean Balharry and Fabio Garcia. His mother is Australian, and his father is from Colombia. Garcia's mother is a retired physiotherapist. Garcia attended Knox Grammar School where he completed his high school education. He also received formal tap dance training at Capital Dance Studio in Sydney, Australia. Garcia attended Sydney University, but did not complete his education as he left the university to take the role of Slide in the production of the musical Hot Shoe Shuffle, which toured Australia for two years before transferring to London, England. Garcia began his film career in 1997, playing the role of Jones in Brian Gilbert's Wilde. Garcia played Tony Manero in the stage version of Saturday Night Fever, which premiered on 5 May 1998 at the London Palladium, and closed on 26 February 2000.[9] He was nominated for his work in the play at the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical category in 1999, but lost to the cast of Kat and the Kings.[10] Garcia also reached number 15 in the UK Singles Chart in 1998, with his cover version of the Bee Gees song "Night Fever", taken from the film version of Saturday Night Fever (1977). In 2000, he played a major role in his second feature-film, Coyote Ugly. Later that year, Garcia also appeared in Dein Perry's Bootmen, playing the lead role. In 2004, he also played alongside Lindsay Lohan and Megan Fox in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, as the character Stu Wolff, a drunk rock star, who is part of the band Sidarthur and is, in Lola's words, "a greater poet than Shakespeare". Between 2006 and 2007, Garcia played the character of Fiyero in the original West End production of Wicked alongside Idina Menzel, Kerry Ellis and Helen Dallimore. He previously played the same role during the show's early Broadway theatre workshops in 2000. Garcia appeared in two ITV dramas, Britannia High and Mr Eleven, in 2008. In January 2010, Garcia appeared with Ashley Banjo and Kimberly Wyatt as a judge on the British reality show Got to Dance. He was a judge in the four seasons of the competition, from 2010 to 2012 and then again in 2014. In 2011, Garcia co-starred with Mischa Barton in The Hen Do, but the film never left the cutting room floor. In 2012, he appeared in Cole Porter's musical Kiss Me, Kate at the Chichester Festival Theatre, directed by Trevor Nunn and choreographed by Stephen Mear. Garcia was nominated for his role at the 2013 Laurence Olivier Awards in the category Best Performance in a Supporting Role in a Musical