Chris Noth

Chris Noth, born Christopher David Noth on November 13, 1954, in Madison, Wisconsin, is an American actor whose career has spanned stage, film, and television. He is the youngest of three sons born to Jeanne Parr, a news reporter who was among the first female correspondents for CBS News and hosted her own CBS talk show, The Jeanne Parr Show, and Charles James Noth, a marketing-company vice president and insurance agent who had served as a naval aviator in World War II and as an Ensign aboard the USS Antietam during the Korean War. Charles came from a wealthy Chicago family, and his mother carried Irish ancestry tracing to Knockbride in County Cavan. Noth's father died in a car accident in 1966, when Noth was eleven years old.

When Noth was five, the family relocated to Stamford, Connecticut, where he grew up while his parents worked in New York City. His parents separated when he was nine or ten. Following a period of adolescent trouble that included vandalism and a joyride in a neighbor's car that ended with the vehicle rolling into a house, his mother enrolled him at the all-boys Storm King School for his freshman year, from 1968 to 1969. He subsequently persuaded her to allow him to transfer to The Barlow School, an experimental coeducational institution in Dutchess County, New York, where poet and dissenter Peter Kane Dufault taught American history. Noth has credited Dufault as the best teacher he ever had, saying Dufault opened up a life of the imagination through poetry. During his mother's brief second marriage, the family moved to southern California in 1969 before returning to New York in the early 1970s.

After graduating from The Barlow School, Noth moved to Brooklyn with his girlfriend at eighteen and worked at a school for the mentally disabled. He then attended Marlboro College in Vermont, where he studied English literature and religion with the original intention of becoming a writer or poet. Although Marlboro had no theatre department, he discovered acting by joining the college's repertory theatre company, initially to avoid Latin class. His first stage appearance was in She Stoops to Conquer, and a subsequent production of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story solidified his ambition to become a stage actor. After graduating, he arrived in New York in late 1978 and found little work available for young actors. He was accepted into the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre to study with Sanford Meisner, and also studied script analysis with Stella Adler. He was expelled from the Neighborhood Playhouse after a photograph appeared in The New York Times showing him acting in a 1979 Manhattan Theatre Club production, which violated the school's prohibition on outside theatrical work.

Noth earned his Actors' Equity membership at the Circle Rep Lab and appeared in Circle Repertory Company's 1980 production of Innocent Thoughts, Harmless Intentions, playing soldier James "Duke" Wade. He auditioned for both Juilliard and Yale University and was accepted by each, ultimately choosing the three-year MFA program at Yale School of Drama on scholarship. During his time at Yale, he acted in twenty-five or more plays, attending classes during the day and performing at night. Notable Yale productions included the Maxim Gorky play The Lower Depths in 1982 to 1983, the world premiere of Wole Soyinka's A Play of Giants at Yale Repertory Theatre in 1984, and Keith Reddin's Rum and Coke at Yale Repertory Theatre in 1985. He also appeared in productions of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, William Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and Brendan Behan's The Hostage, the last of which led to him signing with an agent. He graduated with an MFA in 1985.

Following graduation, Noth pursued stage work and appeared in a range of regional productions. In 1986, while working on the television series Hill Street Blues, he auditioned for and won the title role in Hamlet, directed by Zoe Caldwell at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut. In the 1988 to 1989 season at Milwaukee Repertory Theater, he played a murderous bandit in the experimental Chilean play The Torch. In April 1989, he appeared as Frank Shabata in Darrah Cloud's adaptation of Willa Cather's O Pioneers! at Seattle Repertory Theatre, and later that year played Sergius Saranoff in George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man at the Roundabout Theatre in New York.

On Broadway, Noth performed between 2000 and 2011. His credits include That Championship Season and the play The Best Man. For his Broadway work, he received a Theatre World Award in 2001.

On television, Noth became widely recognized for three major roles. He played NYPD Detective Mike Logan on Law and Order from 1990 to 1995, later reprising the character on Law and Order: Criminal Intent from 2005 to 2008. He portrayed the character known as Big on Sex and the City from 1998 to 2004, reprising the role in the feature films Sex and the City in 2008 and Sex and the City 2 in 2010, and again in the revival series And Just Like That. He also starred as Peter Florrick on The Good Wife from 2009 to 2016. Noth received a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor in a Television Series for Sex and the City in 1999 and a second nomination in the same category for The Good Wife in 2010. He starred in the first two seasons of the 2021 CBS revival of The Equalizer. His roles in both The Equalizer and And Just Like That were curtailed following the emergence of multiple sexual assault allegations against him in December 2021.