Chris Noth

Christopher David Noth born November 13, 1954) is an American actor. He is known for his television roles as NYPD Detective Mike Logan on Law & Order (1990–1995), Big on Sex and the City (1998–2004), and Peter Florrick on The Good Wife (2009–2016).

Noth reprised his role of Mike Logan on Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2005–2008), and reprised his role of Big in the films Sex and the City (2008) and Sex and the City 2 (2010). He was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor on Television for Sex and the City in 1999 and for The Good Wife in 2010.

Noth starred in the first two seasons of the 2021 revival of The Equalizer, on CBS, and appeared in And Just Like That..., the revival of Sex and the City. His roles in both series were curtailed after the emergence of multiple sexual assault allegations against Noth in December 2021.

Early life Noth was born November 13, 1954, in Madison, Wisconsin, and insurance agent who was a naval aviator in World War II and served as Ensign on the during the Korean War.

Noth's family settled in Stamford, Connecticut, when he was five. Noth grew up in Connecticut while his parents worked in New York City. His parents separated when he was 9 or 10, and his father died in a car accident in 1966 when Chris was 11. Noth said that he started taking LSD with friends at age 15, once walking into someone else's house in Newport Beach while high and jumping naked off their pier into the water.

After Noth took a neighbor's car for a joyride and it rolled into another neighbor's house, his mother sent him to an all-boys boarding school (Storm King School) where he spent his freshman year (1968-1969). Noth persuaded his mother to let him leave Storm King School to attend an experimental coed school called The Barlow School in Dutchess County, New York, instead. Noth said Dufault was the best teacher he ever had, "He opened up a way of life to me, a life of the imagination; he showed us ... that life can be developed and explored through poetry". and worked at a school for the mentally disabled. He received a classically oriented education Although the college did not have a theatre department, he discovered acting after joining the repertory theatre company to get out of Latin class. He first appeared on stage in the play She Stoops To Conquer, where he enjoyed the audience's unexpected laughter. After acting in a production of The Zoo Story by Edward Albee, his goals were set on becoming a stage actor. After graduation, he was eager to perform in The New York Repertory Theatre The first and only job he could get was as a daytime bartender at the Only Child Restaurant, not realizing there was a brothel above the basement pub. He was accepted into the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre to study with acting teacher Sanford Meisner. He also studied script analysis with Stella Adler. He auditioned for Juilliard and Yale University and was accepted by both. He chose the shorter three-year degree at Yale School of Drama, where he got a scholarship. attending classes during the day and acting in plays at night. In 1985, Noth acted in Keith Reddin's Rum and Coke at Yale Repertory Theatre, a play about the orchestration of the Bay of Pigs Invasion. By Noth's third year, he signed with an agent who saw him in a YSD production of Brendan Behan's The Hostage.

After graduating with an MFA in 1985, The play was performed for student groups in the spring season that year and Noth felt the enthusiastic response of students from the inner cities to Hamlet's soliloquies made it one of his greatest experiences. In the 1988/89 season of Milwaukee Repertory Theater, he played a murderous bandit in the experimental Chilean play The Torch. In April 1989, Noth played "bohemian--out of place, angry with the world" Frank Shabata in Darrah Cloud's adaptation of the Willa Cather novel O Pioneers! in the Other Season at Seattle Repertory Theatre, co-produced by Women's Project. He also appeared in George Bernard Shaw play Arms and the Man at the Roundabout Theatre in 1989 as Sergius Saranoff. The New York Times wrote that Noth's acting "captures the strutting buffoon in the character" but lost "the more pitiable side", while The Christian Science Monitor wrote if "Noth's swaggering Sergius were any more Sergius-like, he would burst out of his uniform". Noth acted in plays for La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club and L.A.'s Mark Taper Forum. Linney became friends with Noth when they worked together on Patronage and Noth encouraged him to write a play about Delmore Schwartz Noth performed in the 2002 staged reading of Linney's play Klonsky and Schwartz at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's annual Playwrights Conference and helped workshop the play at the 2003 Last Frontier Theatre Conference. In 1998, while working on Sex and the City before its TV debut, Noth did his first radio play as fortune-hunter Morris Townsend in the Voice of America production of The Heiress, an adaptation of the Henry James novel Washington Square, opposite Amy Irving in the title role.

In 2000, Noth made his Broadway debut Variety wrote that Noth "plays the role capably but without the seething edge required" The revival went on to win a Drama Desk Award and Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding revival of a play and was nominated for Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play. In the 2002 premiere of Christopher Shinn's play What Didn't Happen at Playwrights Horizons, Noth's portrayal of Peter was described as "an enjoyably robust portrait" by The New York Times and "an endearing, minor-key star turn" by Variety.

Noth played Colonel Thayer in a 2005 staged reading of a revival of another Gore Vidal play, the 1961 drama On the March to the Sea, presented by Theater Previews at Duke at Duke University. According to reviews of his portrayal, "Noth effectively conveys a jaded, command soldier tired of war, sometimes ruthless, yet often philosophical and sympathetic", although Noth "followed the script" when it occasionally turned melodramatic. Noth received glowing reviews as petty criminal "Teach" in David Mamet's play American Buffalo at the 2005 Berkshire Theatre Festival. In 2008, Noth portrayed Paul Zara in Beau Willimon's Off-Broadway debut play Farragut North staged by the Atlantic Theatre Company. In 2009, Noth reprised the role in the play's West coast debut at the Geffen Playhouse opposite Chris Pine. Sex and the City 2 director Michael Patrick King demanded Noth lose the weight he gained for his role in the play before filming began.

In 2011, Noth starred in a Broadway revival of the 1972 play That Championship Season, playing Phil Romano. In 2019 Noth appeared with Isabelle Huppert in an Off-Broadway production of Florian Zeller's The Mother.

Film and television Noth played small parts in films, including Smithereens (1982) and Baby Boom (1987) before his first starring role in the low-budget 1988 film Peluru dan Wanita (Bullets & Women) in Indonesia. Noth joined the cast of Hill Street Blues in the sixth season in 1986, where he was billed as "Christopher Noth". He also appeared in Another World.

Noth filmed a pilot for the legal/police drama series Law & Order in 1988, playing NYPD homicide detective Mike Logan. In 1990, NBC began airing Law & Order. Noth was fired from the show in 1995, due largely to creative friction with series creator Dick Wolf. He reprised the role of Logan in 1998 for the Law & Order television film, Exiled: A Law & Order Movie.

In 1995, Noth had a supporting role in a CBS miniseries adaptation of the Sidney Sheldon novel Nothing Lasts Forever where he and Vanessa Williams portrayed lovers who are medical residents in a San Francisco hospital. Noth appeared in a 1997 episode of the TV series Touched by an Angel. In the 1997 television mini-series Rough Riders on TNT he portrayed Craig Wadsworth, a member of the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry.

From 1998 to 2004, Noth took the role of Carrie Bradshaw's on-again, off-again boyfriend "Big" on HBO's Sex and the City. He had a small role as Helen Hunt's husband in the film Cast Away (2000) starring Tom Hanks. In 2001, he played an FBI agent on a three-episode arc of Crossing Jordan.

From 2005 to 2008, Noth returned to the role of Mike Logan on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, joining the show in its fifth season following a guest appearance on a fourth season episode. On this spin-off of the original Law & Order, Noth's detective team alternated episodes with Vincent D'Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe's characters. In the 2005 rom-com film, The Perfect Man, Noth's portrayal of the romance expert from whom Hilary Duff's lead character models a secret admirer for her mother was described as "appealing in a thinly written role" by Variety.

In the CBS series The Good Wife (2009–2016), Noth portrayed Peter Florrick, disgraced and resurrected politician husband of the title character portrayed by Julianna Margulies. In 2009, Noth guest-starred as an authoritarian military man in the film My One and Only starring Renée Zellweger as a woman searching for a spouse.

In 2012, Noth narrated I Didn't Do It, a six-part crime documentary series about wrongful convictions produced by Toronto's Lively Media for Discovery Canada and Investigation Discovery and portrayed tycoon J. P. Morgan, who helped finance the Titanic, in the Encore channel miniseries Titanic: Blood and Steel. In 2013, he portrayed Anthony Romano, a financier of Deep Throat, in the film Lovelace. In 2014, Noth played the son-in-law of an aging man, Fred, portrayed by Christopher Plummer in the film Elsa & Fred. In the 2015 film After the Ball, Noth played a head of a Montreal fashion company.

In 2016, Noth joined the third season of the FX/Fox 21 Television Studios produced series Tyrant in the regular role of U.S. General William Cogswell who offers military support to the interim president of a fictional Middle Eastern country that is trying to start a social democracy. A review of Noth's first Tyrant episode likened General Cogswell to his Peter Florrick character in The Good Wife. he was turning to darker roles after years of playing (mostly) good guys on his three hit TV shows. In the 2016 film Chronically Metropolitan Noth's portrayal of a philandering professor/novelist was praised by The Hollywood Reporter for "infusing his familiar-feeling character with intriguing nuances" and as "very good" by the Los Angeles Times.

In 2017, Noth played FBI agent Don Ackerman on the Discovery Channel's series Manhunt: Unabomber, about the hunt for the serial killer Ted Kaczynski and was the narrator for the "Sharks and the City: New York" episode of Discovery channel's Shark Week. Noth also portrayed FBI agent Frank Novak in Gone, a 12-episode procedural drama produced by NBC Universal. The New York Post wrote in its review of the show that "Noth, who's always reliable, is fine here, but doesn't have much to do other than set up each storyline and then bark lots of orders."

In 2021, Noth played the lead role of William Bishop in CBS reboot crime drama series The Equalizer, which was written by Andrew W. Marlowe and Terri Edda Miller. The same year, Noth reprised his role as Mr. Big in And Just Like That..., the Sex and the City continuation, By the end of the year, he was fired and the ad was pulled due to allegations of sexual assault.

Noth had a relationship with model Beverly Johnson from 1990 to 1995. Johnson filed a restraining order against Noth, accusing him of physical, verbal, and racial abuse.

He began a relationship with Tara Lynn Wilson, after meeting her in 2001 or 2002. Their son Orion was born in January 2008. and another location in London, Ontario. They were married on April 6, 2012. Noth announced the birth of their second son, Keats, in February 2020.

Noth moved with his family to the Los Angeles suburb of Sherman Oaks. He owns an apartment in Greenwich Village that he has had since 1994, The family has a summer house in the Berkshires on the edge of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The incidents allegedly occurred in Los Angeles in 2004, and in New York in 2015. He denied the allegations, claiming the incidents were consensual and that he did not cross the line of "no means no". The next day, actress and screenwriter Zoe Lister-Jones alleged that Noth was "consistently sexually inappropriate" when she worked with him on a 2005 episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, was "a sexual predator", and was drunk while filming his scenes. Subsequently, he was dropped by A3 Artists Agency.

On December 18, 2021, another woman accused Noth of sexual assault saying that, when she was 18 years old and in New York in 2010, Noth forcibly kissed her and removed her tights in an effort to digitally penetrate her. Noth's publicist denied the incident happened and said Noth did not know the woman.

In the wake of the allegations, a $12 million deal for Entertainment Arts Research Inc. to buy Noth's tequila brand Ambhar was canceled, a Peloton commercial starring Noth and Ryan Reynolds was pulled from the air, A second appearance as Big in the season finale of And Just Like That... was also scrapped, and he made no third appearance in Doctor Who.

Filmography

Film Year Title Role Notes1981 Cutter's Way Guard Uncredited Waitress! Cowley's Office 1982 Smithereens Transvestite Prostitute In Van 1986 Off Beat Ely Wareham Jr. 1987 Baby Boom Yuppie Husband 1988 Peluru dan Wanita Falco 1991 Boyz n the Hood The Waiter 1993 Naked in New York Jason Brett 1995 Burnzy's Last Call Kevin 1997 The Deli Sal Cold Around the Heart "T" The Broken Giant Jack Frey 1999 Getting to Know You Sonny The Confessions Campuso A Texas Funeral Clinton Pigeonholed Devon's Father 2000 The Acting Class Martin Ballsac Cast Away Dr. Jerry Lovett 2001 Double Whammy Detective Chick Dimitri The Glass House Uncle Jack Avery 2002 Searching for Paradise Michael De Santis 2004 Mr. 3000 Schiembri Tooth Fairy Dad Short film 2005 The Perfect Man Ben Cooper 2008 Sex and the City John James "Mr. Big" Preston Frame of Mind Steve Lynde 2009 My One and Only Harlan 2010 Sex and the City 2 John James "Mr. Big" Preston Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths Lex Luthor Voice Sure Fire Hit Tony 2011 From Up on Poppy Hill Akio Kazama Voice 2012 3,2,1... Frankie Go Boom Jack 2013 Lovelace Anthony Romano 2014 Elsa & Fred Jack 2015 After the Ball Lee Kassell 2016 White Girl George Fratelli Chronically Metropolitan Christopher 2020 A New York Christmas Wedding Father Kelly Also executive producer

Television Year Title Role Notes1986 Killer in the Mirror Johnny Mathews Television film Hill Street Blues Officer Ron Lipsky 3 episodes Apology Roy Burnette Television film1987 At Mother's Request Steve Klein I'll Take Manhattan Fred Knox 1989 Monsters The Devil Episode: "Satan in the Suburbs" 1990–1995 Law & Order Detective Mike Logan Main role 1993 In the Shadows, Someone's Watching Dr. Ferris Television film 1994 Where Are My Children? Cliff Vernon 1995 Homicide: Life on the Street Detective Mike Logan Episode: "Law & Disorder" Nothing Last Forever Dr. Ken Mallory Miniseries1996 Abducted: A Father's Love Larry Coster Television film Born Free: A New Adventure Dr. David Thompson 1997 Rough Riders Craig Wadsworth Miniseries Touched by an Angel Carl Atwater Episode: "Full Moon" Medusa's Child Tony DiStefano Television film 1998–2004 Sex and the City John James "Mr. Big" Preston Recurring role, 41 episodes 1998 Exiled: A Law & Order Movie Detective Mike Logan Television film2001 Crossing Jordan FBI Special Agent Drew Haley 2 episodes The Judge Paul Madriani Television film 2003 Julius Caesar Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus Miniseries 2004 Bad Apple Mike Tozzi Television film; also executive producer 2005–2008 Law & Order: Criminal Intent Detective Mike Logan Main role 2009–2016 The Good Wife Peter Florrick Recurring role2012 I Didn't Do It The Narrator 6 episodes Titanic: Blood and Steel J. P. Morgan 2016 Tyrant General William Cogswell 10 episodes2017 Shark Week The Narrator Episode: "Sharks and the City: New York" Manhunt: Unabomber Don Ackerman 7 episodes 2017–2018 Gone FBI Agent Frank Booth Main role 2018, 2021 Doctor Who Jack Robertson 2 episodes2019 Catastrophe James Cohen Episode #4.5 Very Important Person Chris Noth Episode #2.12 2021–2022 The Equalizer William Bishop Main role (seasons 1 and 2) 2021 And Just Like That... John James "Mr. Big" Preston Episode: "Hello, It's Me"

Awards and nominations