 |
 |
 |
From serial killers to psychotic cyborgs to the Frankenstein Monster himself, few actors put the shivers up moviegoers’ spines in the ’80s and ’90s like Tom Noonan. The towering (6′ 5″) film heavy, who died last week at 74, had a knack for playing villains, creeps, and suspicious types. He was equally adept, however, at character roles and also found success as a writer and director on stage, screen, and television.
The son of a math teacher and a dentist/jazz musician, Noonan was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1951. He didn’t fall into acting until he was in his mid-20s, working off-Broadway and appearing in the original production of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child. Tom’s film debut came in 1980 with a minor role in Paul Mazursky’s Willie & Phil; that same year he turned up as a gangster in John Cassavetes’ Gloria and in Michael Cimino’s ill-fated frontier saga Heaven’s Gate.
With appearances in such early ’80s titles as Wolfen, Easy Money, Best Defense, and F/X under his belt, Tom got his breakthrough role when director Michael Mann cast him as demented, tattooed killer Francis Dollarhyde–aka “The Tooth Fairy”–in 1986’s Manhunter. Noonan later said the key to his audition was trying to scare the woman reading lines alongside him. Based on the novel Red Dragon by Thomas Harris (Silence of the Lambs), the stylish thriller also introduced Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (sic), played by Brian Cox, to audiences.
1987 found Tom bringing his imposing presence to the part of Frankenstein’s Monster in the kids-versus-creatures cult romp The Monster Squad. While it may not make anyone forget Boris Karloff, the actor’s sympathetic portrayal of the patchwork creation is a memorable one. Befriended by the little sister of the Squad’s leader, “Frank” helps them stop Count Dracula (Duncan Regehr) and his allies from taking over the world. Noonan finished the decade as a thug taking on mismatched cops Pat Morita and Jay Leno (!) in Collision Course, followed by a cameo in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train.
Noonan was a different kind of “Frankenstein”– a 21st-century Detroit drug lord whose brain is implanted into a cyborg body by the corrupt OCP corporation–in 1990’s RoboCop 2. Three years later he got the chance to both the axe-wielding Ripper, arch-enemy of film lawman Jack Slater (Arnold Schwarzenegger), and himself in the meta comedy/thriller Last Action Hero. The film failed to connect at the box office, but at least Mattel put out an action figure of Noonan as the Ripper.
In between his bad guy turns Tom tried his hand at playwriting. His first was a two-person seriocomedy, What Happened Was… Following a first date whose participants reveal more about themselves than they intended, the well-received stage play became a 1994 film which earned co-star/director/scripter Noonan the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize. He was back at Park City the next year with The Wife, also based on a play he wrote and featuring Karen Young, Wallace Shawn, and Julie Hagerty. Other 1990s appearances included alongside Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Mann’s Heat (1995) and in The Astronaut’s Wife (1999), with Charlize Theron and Johnny Depp. On the small screen, Tom was seen in such shows as The Equalizer, The X-Files, and Early Edition (he also wrote and directed two episodes of the syndicated series Monsters).
Over the next decade Noonan would play a preacher suspected of being a child killer in Sean Penn’s psycho-thriller The Pledge (2001); a sheriff in the actioner Knockaround Guys (also ’01); and a frontier minister in the western drama Seraphim Falls (2006). He was featured in two horror outings by Delaware native Ti West, 2005’s The Roost and 2009’s The House of the Devil. Perhaps most notably, he was Sammy Barnathan, the man hired by theatre director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to portray him in an an elaborate stage simulacrum of Cotard’s life, in writer/director Charlie Kaufman’s surreal Synecdoche, New York (2008).
In the 2010s Tom had recurring roles on three cable series: as Detective Huntly in Damages; Reverend Cole in Hell on Wheels; and the aptly-named Pallid Man in 12 Monkeys. His movie credits for this time included turns in such indie efforts as 2014’s Late Phases: Night of the Lone Wolf and 2017’s Wonderstruck, along with voicing the identical-looking puppet residents of Kaufman’s 2015 stop-motion short film Anomalisa.
Married twice with two children, Noonan spent the last several several years in semi-retirement before passing from as yet unspecified causes on February 14. Recalling his villain-filled body of work in a 1994 interview, the actor admitted “I’ve always been a very quiet person, and ironic, and subtle, and a lot of the parts that I get to play are these loudmouth maniacs who have something really wrong with them.” There may have been something wrong with them, but they had the right man to play them.