Background
He is the son of Czechoslovakian immigrants, Lubomir and Marianne Hintnaus, who escaped from their home country to West Germany, but were unable to emigrate directly to the United States.
He is the son of Czechoslovakian immigrants, Lubomir and Marianne Hintnaus, who escaped from their home country to West Germany, but were unable to emigrate directly to the United States.
Hintnaus attended the now closed Aviation High School in Redondo Beach, California.
Although he is an American citizen, he represented his native country, Brazil, in the Olympic Games following the American boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. As an intermediate stop, they moved first to Brazil, where Tom was born. They moved to the United States in 1960 when he was two.
As an American citizen he qualified first in the 1980 United States Olympic Trials.
This is a former South American record. lieutenant was broken by countryfellow Fábio Gomes da Silva in 2007.
Hintnaus is also known as the first model in the underwear advertising campaign of designer Calvin Klein. The photograph by Bruce Weber of Hintnaus in white briefs, leaning against a thickly white-washed chimney on Santorini Island in Greece, became the iconic image of "male as sex object" in the 1980s.
American Photographer magazine named the photo as one of “10 Pictures That Changed America.”
Hintnaus appeared in the Hawaii Five-0 Season 4 episode, "Ha"uoli Louisiana Ho"omaika"i" as assassin Dante Barkov.