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After starring in the original Law and Order for its first five years, Chris Noth reprises his role as Detective Mike Logan partnering with Detective Wheeler, played by Julianne Nicholson.

Chris Noth

Noth (pronounced to rhyme with "both"), is a name which has its origins in the European area of Alsace-Lorraine (on the border of France and Germany), where it is pronounced as "note." The youngest of three sons whose father, Charles, died when he was eight, Noth traveled throughout the United Kingdom, Serbia, and Spain with his mother, CBS News reporter Jeanne Parr, who is of Irish descent.

Noth's undergraduate (poetry-writing) years were spent at Marlboro College in Vermont, where he built himself a log cabin. He earned an MFA from Yale School of Drama (where he acted in some twenty-five plays) and was a pupil of acting coach Sanford Meisner before making his film debut in 1988 in the low-budget Jakarta (Noth lived in Indonesia for a year-and-half and has called it his "spiritual home"). He also had small parts in films such as Smithereens (1982) and Baby Boom (1987), and on TV series such as Hill Street Blues and Another World.

In 1988, he filmed a pilot for the legal/police drama series Law & Order. In 1990, NBC began airing the show, which slowly gained recognition from critics and fans. The darkly handsome Noth's intense portrayal of the cocky, troubled Detective Mike Logan made him the most popular actor on the show, so viewers were stunned when producers fired him in 1995. Frequent personality clashes between Noth and the writers were cited; both sides remained cool toward each other but warmed up long enough to film a Logan-dominated TV movie, Exiled: A Law & Order Movie (1998).

Noth scored a strong comeback in 1998 when he began the role of Carrie Bradshaw's enigmatic on-again/off-again boyfriend "Mr. Big" on HBO's Sex and the City. Noth played the role for six years, during which he also appeared in a small role as Helen Hunt's husband in the hit film Cast Away (2000) and starred in a Broadway revival of The Best Man. In 2001 he played an FBI agent on a couple of episodes of Crossing Jordan, re-uniting him with Law & Order co-star Jill Hennessy.

Noth co-owns a New York City nightclub called The Cutting Room , and can be found on the NYC party scene, or in the local gossip rags. Former girlfriends include actress Winona Ryder and supermodel Beverly Johnson, with whom he had an extremely volatile relationship that ended in litigation.