Born in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1951, Noonan got an unusually late start as an actor. Standing six foot five, Noonan spent much of his youth as a basketball player and didn’t begin acting until he was 27. Before making his film debut with a small part in Willie & Phil in 1980, Noonan performed on the stage. “The first play I ever did that got me any kind of attention was Buried Child by Sam Shepard,” he recalled in a 2009 Random Roles interview with The A.V. Club. “It had won the Pulitzer Prize, and it ran for a year in New York. It was the first thing I ever did that people really saw me in, and I was sort of sweet and funny, but sort of scary in it.” From then on, Noonan was often cast as creepy characters.
One of Noonan’s most famous roles came in 1986 in Manhunter, a Thomas Harris adaptation from director Michael Mann. Noonan played Francis Dollarhyde. The following year, he put his physical stature to good use as Frankenstein’s Monster in Monster Squad. Describing his take on the character like Lenny from Of Mice And Men, director Fred Dekker recalled, “Somehow or other, this appealed to Tom who, like most great actors, enjoy playing roles with contradictions and challenges (and a reference to a classic novel and movie never hurts).” In 1990, Noonan portrayed RoboCain in RoboCop 2, facing off against Peter Weller’s original.
“I was making RoboCop 2, and my face started twitching. We weren’t sure why,” Noonan would later recall. This condition would push him back to the theater and into one of the most artistically fruitful periods of his career. Noonan spent a good chunk of the early ‘90s writing and staging What Happened Was… before it became his directorial debut. “I mean, it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever done, and the script, I thought, was really good, but I had no expectation it would ever be seen by anyone,” Noonan said. In addition to the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, Noonan also won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the festival. He followed the film with 1995’s The Wife, which starred Wallace Shawn, Karen Young, and Julie Hagerty in addition to Noonan; that film also competed for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.
That same year, Noonan reunited with Michael Mann for Heat, in which he portrayed Kelso. In the following years, he acted in films like The Pledge, Eight Legged Freaks, Synecdoche, New York, Anomalisa, and Wonderstruck. He also has several recurring roles in TV series in the final years of his life, including Damages, Hell On Wheels, and 12 Monkeys. His final role was in 2018, in the HBO animated series Animals. Reflecting on playing himself in 1993’s Last Action Hero, Noonan quipped, “That was, I found, very difficult… But I did my best. It was not easy for me to fake being a movie star.”
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