Tom Noonan

His debut feature film as a filmmaker, What Happened Was.. (1994), won the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Film Festival.

Thomas Patrick Noonan was born on April 12, 1951, in Greenwich, Connecticut, the son of Rita (McGannon), a mathematics teacher, and John Noonan Sr., a jazz musician and doctor of dental surgery. He had an older brother, John Ford Noonan, an actor, playwright, and screenwriter, and two sisters, Barbara and Nancy. Noonan was a very talented basketball player, and said "playing basketball is how I learned to perform in a lot of ways. It's how I got interested in performing... I never acted as a kid. I never did school plays. I never acted until I was 27...you learn a lot when you're in front of people and you've got a crowd going and you're doing something that you love to do. A lot of the skills that you would need for acting come through that... It's like a life and death struggle in front of people that you hope to impress."

Noonan started working in theatre (appearing in the original Off-Broadway production of Sam Shepard's play Buried Child), but in the 1980s he began working in film. At 6 ft 5 in (1.96 m) tall, Noonan's imposing presence was probably responsible for his tendency to be cast as menacing villains, as in RoboCop 2, Last Action Hero, Manhunter, and The Pledge. His height was used to comic effect in "The Moving Finger", the series finale of the horror anthology Monsters (several episodes of which he also directed and wrote). In 1986, Noonan played Francis Dollarhyde, a serial killer who kills entire families, in Michael Mann's Manhunter, the first movie to feature Hannibal Lecter. Another supporting role, and another collaboration with Mann was in 1995, as Kelso in Heat. He also played the Frankenstein monster in The Monster Squad and drug kingpin Cain in RoboCop 2. During the 1990s, he wrote various plays, including two that he made into movies, What Happened Was... (1994) and The Wife (1995). In the 2000s, Noonan appeared in several other movies, including Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut, as Sammy Barnathan in Synecdoche, New York. Noonan also made numerous appearances in television series, including The X-Files (in the much-praised 1996 episode "Paper Hearts" that was written specifically for him), Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Tales from the Darkside, and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, (in which he starred alongside William Petersen, who played his nemesis, Will Graham, in Manhunter), and Detective Victor Huntley in Damages. He appeared on Blacklist as The Stew Maker, Louie as a doctor who takes the young Louie through the crucifixion in graphic anatomical detail. He also portrayed the Reverend Nathaniel Cole in the AMC original series Hell on Wheels. In 2015, Noonan voiced all of the supporting characters in Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman's stop-motion comedy-drama film Anomalisa, for which he won the San Diego Film Critics Society Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Noonan died at a hospital in Englewood, New Jersey, on February 14, 2026, at the age of 74. His death was initially announced by actress Karen Sillas on her Instagram account, and later confirmed by Fred Dekker in a tribute on Facebook.