The writer and director Michael Mann’s stylish thriller Manhunter (1986), adapted from Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon, was the first screen outing for the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, played in this instance by Brian Cox and in three further films by Anthony Hopkins. By far the most haunting figure in Manhunter, though, is the psychopath Francis Dollarhyde, nicknamed “the Tooth Fairy”. As played by the looming, softly spoken actor Tom Noonan, who has died aged 74, he is both chilling and pitiful.
Though we see the gruesome aftermath of Dollarhyde’s crimes early on, it is nearly an hour before we meet the man himself, his features smudged and flattened by a stocking worn over the upper half of his face. “That’s the first thing we shot,” the actor said. “I could tell the crew was scared of me.”
Even once the stocking is removed, he is not a comforting presence. The apparent placidity, the capacity for tenderness, only render the character’s bloodlust more disturbing. “Making ‘bad people’ seem human is the key to making them scary,” Noonan said.
Nowhere is that more evident than in his scenes with Reba (Joan Allen), a blind darkroom assistant. Developing a fondness for her, Dollarhyde takes her to a veterinarian’s surgery, where she is given the chance to caress a tiger which has been sedated prior to a tooth extraction. This complex scene raises the emotional stakes of a film that is already visually rich to the point of overkill. Watching from the corner of the operating room as Reba’s hands explore the deadly but temporarily docile creature, Noonan shows Dollarhyde to be awestruck, finally tipping his head back in a kind of exhausted rapture.
Much of Noonan’s electricity as an actor, aside from his imposing height (6 ft 6in), came from his inscrutability. Manhunter alludes to this when Reba asks to touch his face to determine his expression. “Take my word for it, I’m smiling,” he lies.
“I think I probably have a creepy kind of scary quality,” Noonan said. This was apparent during his Manhunter audition. Incensed that he had been kept waiting all morning, he was then asked to read with an inexperienced assistant. “I guess I scared her during the audition, doing very little,” he said. “And Michael found that very exciting.” On set, Mann offered little direction. “Once in a while, he would just say: ‘Don’t forget the audition,’” Noonan recalled.
Another director to capitalise on Noonan’s off-kilter presence was Charlie Kaufman, whose bleak comedy Synecdoche, New York (2008) similarly refrains from revealing Noonan fully until the halfway point. He is glimpsed intermittently throughout the movie’s first hour, in mackintosh and horn-rimmed glasses, silently watching the theatre director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.
All is revealed when he appears at an audition for the director’s autobiographical masterwork, and explains his suitability for playing him: “I’ve been following you for 20 years … And I’ve learned everything about you. So hire me, and you’ll see who you truly are.”
Mann and Kaufman each cast Noonan on other occasions. He had a small role as Kelso, the informant and hacker passing inside information to the bank robber played by Robert De Niro, in Mann’s thriller Heat (1995).
His neutral voice was all over Kaufman’s Anomalisa (2015), a stop-motion animated feature co-directed by Duke Johnson. That film, about a motivational speaker staying in a soulless hotel on a business trip, began life as a “sound play” performed in Los Angeles in 2005. In that version and again on film, Noonan lent his vocal cords to all but two of the characters, playing more than 40 roles. Even the background hubbub in a hotel bar was woven from recordings of his voice.
Noonan was also an accomplished film-maker. His debut, What Happened Was … (1994), adapted from his own play, won two prizes at Sundance. It depicts in real time a fraught first date between two co-workers (Noonan and Karen Sillas). The script alludes repeatedly to the actor’s own perceived oddness.
His date reveals that their colleagues refer to him as “Mr Strange”, and Noonan’s character admits: “I’m not like a lot of people. My face doesn’t have much to do with how I’m feeling.”
He was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, to Rita (nee McGannon), a teacher, and John Ford Noonan Sr, a jazz musician who quit music to become a dentist. Among Tom’s siblings was the playwright John Ford Noonan, author of the off-Broadway hit A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking, who died in 2018.
Noonan was educated at Yale University, where he took pre-med courses. “My father always wanted to go to Yale, but he couldn’t afford it,” he said in 1996. After dropping out of the university he played the guitar and piano in bands, then wrote music for plays in New York.
Moving into acting, he ignored his brother’s advice about preparing monologues for auditions and wrote his own. He performed at the experimental theatre La MaMa and got his big break originating the role of the mute Tilden in the first production of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child in 1978.
Early movie roles included John Cassavetes’s thriller Gloria, Michael Cimino’s western Heaven’s Gate (both 1980) and the Eddie Murphy/Dudley Moore comedy Best Defense (1984).
In 1983, he co-founded the Paradise Factory theatre, where he taught drama and staged his plays, all of which he turned into films. Wifey, a comedy-drama about married therapists, was filmed in 1995 as The Wife starring Wallace Shawn, Noonan and his then wife Karen Young. He also brought Wang Dang (1999), in which he played a washed-up director exploiting his limited cachet, and The Shape of Something Squashed (2014), about a frustrated actor, from stage to screen.
“Some people think that I’m a playwright who makes movies, but I’m not,” he said in 1999. Putting the films on stage first, he explained, “is how I find out what the scripts are about, where the laughs are and what works and what doesn’t”.
Having played a towering menace in Manhunter, it was a small step to starring as Frankenstein’s Monster, albeit a sweet-natured incarnation, in The Monster Squad (1987), a witty horror romp for children.
Noonan went on to bring flair and nuance to an array of creeps and villains in films such as Robocop 2 (1990), Last Action Hero (1993) and The House of the Devil (2009). On television, he was a child killer in a 1996 episode of The X-Files, and “the Stewmaker”, a dentist who dissolves bodies in acid, in two 2013 episodes of The Blacklist.
Noonan was used cleverly as a red herring in Sean Penn’s thriller The Pledge (2001), though he was dismayed to learn that some viewers still believed he was the killer. “The whole gag in that movie is that I’m the nice guy,” he said.
He is survived by two children, Felix and Wanda, from his marriage to Young, which ended in divorce in 1999. A second marriage, to the director Talia Lugacy, also ended in divorce, in 2015.