Tom Noonan, a memorable, 6-foot-8 character actor whose gallery of strange and distinctive film roles included a psychopathic killer in “Manhunter,” a serial murderer in “The Last Action Hero” and a sweet Frankenstein’s monster in “The Monster Squad,” died on Feb. 14 in Englewood, N.J. He was 74.
His daughter, Wanda Noonan, said he died in a hospital but did not provide the cause.
When he auditioned for “Manhunter” — the 1986 screen adaptation of Thomas Harris’s horror novel “Red Dragon” — he wondered if he truly wanted to play a character as evil as Francis Dollarhyde, who is nicknamed the “Tooth Fairy” for biting his victims.
“I am sort of weird — but not that bad,” he said in an interview with Filmmaker magazine in 2015. But he pleased the director, Michael Mann, by frightening the casting assistant who read lines with him.
Afterward, Mr. Noonan recalled, Mr. Mann posed a question.
“He said, ‘You’re really scary. How do you do that?’”
“I said, ‘Michael, the secret to being scary is to be really scared. Because when you’re really scared, people are really scared of you.’”
In the film, an F.B.I. agent, played by William Petersen, pursues Mr. Dollarhyde, who has a florid red dragon tattoo on his torso.
Reviewing “Manhunter” in The Hartford Courant, Malcolm L. Johnson wrote that Mr. Noonan “makes the murderer terrifying and pitiful, a Frankenstein’s monster who dreams of being a god and who lives in a secluded house filled with images of the moon and the skies.”
His other villains included Cain, a drug dealer and cult leader in “RoboCop 2” (1990); the Ripper, a longhaired, ax-wielding baddie in the Arnold Schwarzenegger action satire “The Last Action Hero” (1993); and a dentist who dissolves bodies in chemicals to destroy evidence, in a 2013 episode of the NBC thriller series “The Blacklist.”
“I’ve always been a very quiet person, and ironic, and subtle, and a lot of the parts I get to play are these loudmouth maniacs who have something really wrong with them,” he told Bomb magazine in 1994, adding, “I’ve never understood why people hire me to do parts like that.”
But it was a part like that — Dollarhyde — that led the director Fred Dekker to ask him to play Frankenstein’s monster in “The Monster Squad” (1987). Mr. Noonan portrayed him as a softy who takes sides with the preteens who battle other resurrected, classic movie monsters in their town.
Mr. Dekker suggested that Mr. Noonan base the character on Lennie in John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella, “Of Mice and Men.”
“I said, ‘A hulking simpleton who just wants to fit in despite his mental and physical drawbacks,’” Mr. Dekker wrote on Facebook after Mr. Noonan’s death. “Somehow or other, this appealed to Tom.”
Thomas Patrick Noonan was born on April 12, 1951, in Greenwich, Conn., the youngest of four children of John Ford Noonan Sr., a jazz saxophonist-turned-dentist, and Rita (McGannon) Noonan, a math teacher.
Tom, who started piano lessons at a young age, learned something about acting at 10 from his older brother, John Jr., whose eventual playwriting career included the Off Broadway hit “A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking.”
“One Sunday dinner with family, I heard my mother say, ‘Johnny, what’s wrong?’ ” Mr. Noonan said in his brother’s obituary in 2018. “John held up a forkful of green peas and said, ‘Mom, these peas are so sad!’ As the tears streamed down his face, he gave me a secret wink. This was my introduction to the nature of real drama.”
He was recruited to Yale University to play basketball, and he took pre-med courses at his father’s urging. Breaking his ankle ended his prospects on the court. In 1971, he dropped out after his sophomore year — “I guess I had what you’d call a breakdown,” he later told The Daily News — then hitchhiked for a while; lived in hippie communes; played electric guitar and piano in rock bands; wrote incidental music for plays in New York; and began to act.
In 1978, his big break was playing Tilden, a mute, childlike character in an Off Off Broadway production of Sam Shepard’s play “Buried Child,” a play that won the Pulitzer Prize the next year. Richard Eder, in his review in The New York Times, wrote that Mr. Noonan “makes the hulking, inchoate Tilden a moving and powerful figure.”
The actor Wallace Shawn recalled seeing Mr. Noonan, in character, shuck corn in that production. “It was so alarming, so disturbing and I guess somewhat humorous, but it was scary,” he said.
Mr. Noonan got small parts in movies, among them “Gloria” and “Heaven’s Gate,” both in 1980, and “Wolfen” (1981).
While creating his movie niche, Mr. Noonan carved out a theatrical career as a stage actor, playwright and director, principally at the Paradise Factory theater, which he founded with his business partner, Jack Kruger, in an abandoned ice cream factory in the East Village.
At the theater, Mr. Noonan wrote, starred in and directed “What Happened Was … ” (1992), about the evisceration of a modern marriage; “Wifey” (1994, a black comedy that earned a special Obie Award citation; “Wang Dang” (1998), about a has-been filmmaker; and “The Shape of Something Squashed” (2014), about a washed-up actor.
He turned all four plays into films — “Wifey” was retitled “The Wife” — and “What Happened Was … ” won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival.
Mr. Shawn was one of Mr. Noonan’s co-stars in “Wifey,” and “The Wife,” which was about married therapists (played by Mr. Noonan and Julie Hagerty) whose lives are upended by one of their patients (Mr. Shawn) and his wife (Karen Young, then married to Mr. Noonan).
“Anybody who saw him as an actor would know that he was the most shockingly present, immediate, in-the-moment actor,” Mr. Shawn said in an interview. “It was thrilling. Tom brought the truthfulness of his acting to his writing and directing.”
As Mr. Noonan prepared to film “Wang Dang” in 1999, he described his immersive process to The Daily News — acting, directing, writing, editing and composing music — as something of a compulsion.
“It’s what I need to do,” he said. “I rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. I don’t do anything else. I don’t go to plays. I don’t have time. I don’t have time to sleep. But I’m not doing what I kind of like. I love doing what I do, and I get to do it every day.”
In addition to his daughter, Mr. Noonan is survived by a son, Felix, and a sister, Dahlia Schroeder. His 12-year marriage to Ms. Young ended in divorce in 2000.
Mr. Noonan had roles in two feature films by the idiosyncratic writer-director Charlie Kaufman: “Synecdoche, New York” (2008) and “Anomalisa” (co-directed by Duke Johnson), a 2015 stop-motion animated film in which the actor provided an astonishing range of voices.
In her review in The Times, Manohla Dargis wrote that Mr. Noonan was “an invaluable vocalizer who creates a supporting cast of thousands (well, dozens) through a voice that rises and lowers, barks and purrs, and builds the ominous wall of sound that opens and closes the movie, as if boxing it shut.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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