Rise to Fame
Fired from Law & Order after five seasons, he walked into the role that would define his career. As Mr. Big on Sex and the City, he played a romantically unavailable Manhattan power broker in a way that made audiences root for him anyway. The character shouldn't have worked, a commitment-phobe who strung along Carrie for years, but Noth played him with enough charm and ambiguity that the show kept bringing him back. He came to the role after serious stage work, an MFA from Yale and years in New York theater, which explains how he made an antihero feel like a leading man.
In the Spotlight
When And Just Like That premiered in December 2021, multiple women gave The Hollywood Reporter accounts alleging assault spanning years. Within days, CBS fired him from The Equalizer, his agency dropped him, a $12 million tequila deal fell apart, and Peloton pulled a commercial. Sarah Jessica Parker, Kristin Davis, and Cynthia Nixon released a joint statement supporting the accusers. Noth called their response 'more Hollywood than Hollywood.' No criminal charges were filed. He's been trying to stage a comeback ever since, which says something about how Hollywood's memory works.
Side Notes
His mother was a CBS News correspondent, so his childhood moved through the UK, Spain, and Czechoslovakia. After reportedly rolling a neighbor's car into a house as a teenager, he got shipped off to boarding school. He trained at Yale School of Drama, appeared in Shakespeare in Stratford, and played Hamlet before anyone knew his name. An early film credit cast him as a transvestite prostitute in Smithereens in 1982. The Yale-trained theater kid and the TV heartthrob never fully reconciled.