Remembering ‘Manhunter’ And ‘RoboCop 2’ Star, Tom Noonan, Who Passed Away At 74
Tom Noonan, the character actor, director, and writer who haunted audiences with his onscreen presence in films such as Manhunter and The Monster Squad, passed away on Valentine’s Day at 74 years old. The announcement came from actress Karen Sillas (Female Perversions), who co-starred with Noonan in his directorial debut, What Happened Was… (1994), in an Instagram post (that she has since deleted), stating that he passed away peacefully.
“Working with him in his original off Broadway play, ‘What Happened Was…,’ at the Paradise Factory Theatre in the early nineties, was a turning point for me and my career that still resonates throughout my life and work as an actor.” The post had said (via The Daily Mail).
Her latter actions may have sown the seeds of skepticism among most critical thinkers, but the actor’s passing was confirmed in a Facebook post by director Fred Dekker (The Monster Squad, Night of the Creeps) shortly after.
“Tom’s indelible performance as Frankenstein in The Monster Squad is a highlight of my modest filmography,” Dekker said on Facebook.
“Having been knocked out by his performance as Francis Dollarhyde in Michael Mann’s Manhunter, I desperately wanted Tom to read the script and consider the part, but I knew that nabbing him was probably a long shot. Nonetheless, he agreed to meet me at his Hollywood apartment to discuss the role,” he added. “I knew the first thing a serious actor would want to know was that my vision for Frankenstein was serious and not ‘campy.’”
Dekker continues, “In the end, he found the make-up arduous and annoying (he was fond of tearing it off after we wrapped, and one night didn’t even bother to take it off; just drove home in his Frankenstein appliance). But all in all, he was the proverbial gentleman and scholar, and the world has lost a great talent. R.I.P. Tom. Thanks for the great work.”
Born in Connecticut on April 12, 1951, Tom Noonan’s mother, Rita McGannon-Noonan, was a math teacher, and his father, John Noonan Sr., bore the title of dental surgeon, who also moonlighted as a jazz musician. His arrival would even the playing field between his older brother (and future collaborator), John, Jr., and their two sisters. Tom’s journey was drastically different from most of his peers.
Not only did he never perform in school plays, but Noonan didn’t even get into acting until he was 27 years old. That’s because his tall, intimidating frame (peaking at 6’5’’) was an invaluable asset to any youth basketball coach who’s worth their weight in gym shoes. However, playing ball in front of a crowd got him accustomed to performing for them.
Very little is known about his formative years leading up to acting, aside from the fact that Noonan attended the Yale School of Drama (later renamed the David Geffen School of Drama) and that he graduated in 1973 – as a musician. It wasn’t until he moved to New York City that he found himself drawn to the twisted world of performative arts:
“When I was 27,” Noonan told BOMB in a 2014 interview. “I was a musician, had never acted, never written, never done any of those things, and I moved to New York to do an album, and someone asked me to do music for a play while I was recording this album, as a guitar player. That got me into being in the rehearsal process of a play, at Ensemble Studio Theater. I was writing all the incidental music and then they said, ‘Can you write a song?’ So I wrote songs for the play and it sort of turned into a musical.”
“Through the course of doing that,” he continued, “I realized, ‘I think I would be good at acting.’ And then, as an actor, I needed something to do all day. So I decided since writing was a major part of drama I’d start learning how to write scenes. And I would write the scenes I would use to go on auditions. I would make up a scene or a monologue from some fictitious play. No one ever challenged me about it. I began writing all my own auditions, and I began getting hired very quickly. Within a month after I started acting I had the lead in a play.”
Noonan’s first role was in an Off-Broadway production of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child in 1978, and his first screen gig was in Paul Mazursky’s 1980 comedy Willie & Phil. Still, he never adopted the same lofty attitude about the profession that denotes most of his fellow dramatists. Well, almost:
“Within a year, I had done Buried Child,” he finished. “Which won the Pulitzer Prize, and I was doing movies. Since I didn’t really give a s—t about show business, or acting, or movies at all – I mean I loved them, but I didn’t really care, I was just sick of music – I would do things on set that people generally would not have the nerve to do. I would rewrite scenes, come in the next morning and hand these pages to the people in the scene with me, and the directors would be all upset, but the actors would read the stuff. I would get into a lot of conflict with people.”
This unorthodox display of professionalism is quite possibly the reason why Noonan lost patience with waiting for anyone to hire him for their productions, and he ended up obtaining the lease for a condemned hat factory in 1983. He spent the next five arduous years building what would become the famous Paradise Factory on East 4th Street in New York City.
To the utter surprise of nobody, Tom began to attract the attention of any filmmaker who was looking to cast a tall, menacing person in their projects, and the 1980s were bursting at the seams with them. He followed his creepy ‘guy in the park’ role with one as an even creepier gangster in the movie Gloria (1980), and a wolf expert in an interesting crime-thriller take on lycanthropy called Wolfen (1981).
Arguably, his most memorable performance came in 1986 as the sadistic Francis “Tooth Fairy” Dolarhyde in Michael Mann’s suspense classic, Manhunter. Generally, an actor who’s typecast is an actor who’s doomed, but Tom’s versatility led to parts in several celebrated gems. The litany includes FX (1986), the less-than-great Last Action Hero (1993), Heat (1995), The Pledge (2001), The House of the Devil (2009), and he lent his voice to the R-rated animated film, Anomalisa (2015).
Most aging 80s babies share the same early memory of Noonan as the benevolent Frankenstein Monster in the aforementioned Monster Squad (1987), and it’s safe to assume that a lot of them were bawling their toddler eyes out at the end of the movie. Then he showed them a completely different side with his portrayal of cult leader/drug lord-turned-killer robot, Cain, in the slightly underwhelming (but still entertaining) RoboCop 2 (1990).
His body of work on television surpasses his filmography with appearances on shows like Tales From the Darkside, The Equalizer, The X-Files, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Damages, Hell on Wheels, The Leftovers, and the surprisingly decent 12 Monkeys series on SyFy – for which there is still no defending the first season.
Tom Noonan is survived by his son and daughter from his marriage to actress Karen Young, lasting from 1992 to 1999.
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