John Ford Noonan Jr. was an American playwright. He also wrote for theater, film and television, and he was an actor. His father worked as a jazz musician. He has four children. His brother, Tom Noonan, is an actor and writer. He was born in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Author
In 1969, his highly acclaimed Lincoln Center Theater production, The Year Boston Won the Pennant, won an Obie Award, and garnered a Theatre World Award nomination and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. In the 1970s several of his plays were produced by Joseph Papp at The Public Theatre, including Older People, which won a Drama Desk Award; Rainbows For Sale, which won an Obie Award; Where Do We Go From Here?; Getting Through The Night and All the Sad Protestants. The Club Champion’s Widow, starring Maureen Stapleton, was produced at the Robert Lewis Acting Company. A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking was produced at the Astor Place Theatre in New York, it starred Susan Sarandon and Eileen Brennan and ran for more than 800 performances. His play, Some Men Need Help, was originally produced in New York City at the 47th Street Theatre; it starred Philip Bosco and Treat Williams. Stay Away a Little Closer starring the author's daughter, Jesse Sage Noonan, and When It Comes Early starring Harris Yulin and Kathleen Chalfant were both produced at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York City. Noonan wrote over 35 plays and was inducted into the French Society of Composers and Authors in 1989. He wrote for TV’s Comedy Zone in the early 1980s and St. Elsewhere, for which his episode, The Women, won the 1982 Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. His second Emmy nomination was for his TV adaptation of his play Some Men Need Help.
Actor
As an actor, he appeared on stage, notably in 1990 at the Actors’ Playhouse in New York, when he appeared in his own play, Talking Things Over with Chekhov, in which he played a character who is also a playwright, who comes home one night to find Anton Chekhov sitting in his rocking chair. He has also appeared in a number of films, including Uncle Freddy, My Divorce, Flirting with Disaster, Adventures in Babysitting, Forty Deuce, Next Stop, Greenwich Village, and Septuagenarian Substitute Ball. In the film, God Has a Rap Sheet, Noonan plays the title character, God, who has taken on the persona of a former literature professor. He also appeared in the TV series Bay State.
Noonan was born in Stamford, Connecticut, the son of Rita, a mathematics teacher, and John Noonan, Sr., a jazz musician and doctor of dental surgery. Noonan was married to Marcia Lunt, whom he divorced in 1968 and had one child with Lynn Cohen, who he was with in the late 70s. He had three children, a son and two daughters. He died at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey on December 16, 2018 at the age of 77 from heart failure.
