Performer Cole started as a musician, playing the
accordion as a young teenager with three other kids in a
western swing band. The band played in amateur contests and small clubs, and even managed to get a one-time gig on
Ray Bolger's mid-1950s television show ''
Where's Raymond?'' Besides playing the accordion, he was also the band's singer. When the ensemble auditioned together at the
Disney Studio for
The Mickey Mouse Club in the spring 1955, he was the only one selected to join the cast of Mouseketeers. Cole's singing ability earned him a transfer to ''The Mickey Mouse Club's'' first-string Red Team midway through the 1955–56 season. He remained with the show for its final two seasons (1956–1958) of original programming and, after filming stopped, attended
Hollywood Professional School and went on live-performance tours with other Mouseketeers to Australia in 1959 and 1960. For the next several years Tommy Cole's career was based on live-singing at teenage clubs, public events, and as an opening act for other performers. He attended
Pasadena City College, did a hitch in the
Air Force, and had guest star parts on a few television shows. By 1964, he had realized that his days as a performer were ending, and so looked around for some other way to stay in show business.
Make-up artist While acting in an episode of
My Three Sons in 1963, Cole had started learning make-up technique from one of the show's regular artists. He soon joined the craft as an apprentice, working first for
ABC, then later in the 1960s for
NBC. He began freelancing as a make-up artist in the early seventies, gathering
Emmy nominations in 1975 for
Masquerade Party and 1978 for
Once Upon a Brothers Grimm, before winning, along with Mark Bussan and
Ron Walters, in 1979 for
Backstairs at the White House. Cole has since been nominated for Emmy awards for the miniseries
Right to Die (1988), the television series
Wings (1996), and most recently for the TV special
Gepetto (2000), for which he shared in winning the Hollywood Makeup Artists and Hairstylist Guild Award. ==Personal life==