Chris Noth

His father was Charles James Noth (1922–1966), a marketing-company vice president and insurance agent who was a naval aviator in World War II and served as Ensign on the USS Antietam (CV-36) during the Korean War.

Charles came from a wealthy family in Chicago, and his mother had Irish ancestry that traces back to Knockbride in County Cavan.

Noth's family settled in Stamford, Connecticut, when he was five.

Noth grew up in Connecticut while his parents worked in New York City.

Christopher David Noth (born November 13, 1954) is an American actor.

Noth was born November 13, 1954, in Madison, Wisconsin, the youngest of three boys, to news reporter Jeanne Parr (1924–2016).

Parr was one of the first female correspondents for CBS News, and host of her own CBS talk show The Jeanne Parr Show.

According to Noth, "losing my father left a crater in my life" and he found father figures in many teachers and certain friends of his mother's. While Parr was working as a CBS news reporter in New York during the 1960s, Noth often got into trouble.

He was into vandalism and was smoking marijuana and driving at a very young age.

His parents separated when he was 9 or 10, and his father died in a car accident in 1966 when he was 11.

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.

Poet-dissenter Peter Kane Dufault taught American history at the school.

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".

For Noth, this school with young artist teachers "for many of us, not relating to our parents, it became our real home", and although "the academics were a little shaky", this art school, with no grades, completely changed his life to focus on the arts.

During Parr's brief second marriage, the family moved to southern California in 1969, returning to New York in the early 1970s.

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.

By 1973, he was "totally into being a hippie" with long hair.

After graduation, he moved to Brooklyn with his girlfriend when he was eighteen, and worked at a school for the mentally disabled.

Noth attended Marlboro College in Vermont, originally intending to be a writer or poet.

He received a classically oriented education and studied English literature and religion.

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 but found that there was not much work for young actors in New York after arriving in late 1978.

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 stayed in maid's rooms for little or no money in exchange for cleaning the house on a weekly basis.

The school did not allow students to work in the theatre, and Noth was expelled after a photo appeared of him in The New York Times acting in a 1979 Manhattan Theatre Club play about an IRA bombing victim.

He also studied script analysis with Stella Adler.

Noth "did off-off Broadway and was a bad waiter in a dozen different restaurants for five years."

He was fired from a number of restaurants, once for forgetting to return Governor Hugh Carey's credit card with the bill, and settled into cater-waitering bar mitzvahs and weddings.

Noth got his Actors' Equity membership while at the Circle Rep Lab.

In Circle Repertory Company's 1980 production of Innocent Thoughts, Harmless Intentions he played soldier James "Duke" Wade in an Alaskan army outpost in 1951–52, part of what the CS Monitor called a "convincing squad of Actors' Equity enlisted men" in a play that was "impressively acted".

He auditioned for Juilliard and Yale University and was accepted by both.

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).

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.

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).