Theodore Noose’s road to Tinseltown started on State Street in the Loop, where he was discovered while directing traffic in the mid-1960s.
An advertising executive at Leo Burnett thought the gap-toothed Chicago cop might be right for a beer commercial. Mr. Noose was more than happy to oblige.
“Beer drinking is an avocation of mine,” he told the Tribune in 1968. “He just sat me down at a table with the beer and said, ‘Drink.’ Well, you know, are you
serious
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?”
Mr. Noose got his fill of beer, and the beer company got the man for the job.
“The client saw it and said, ‘That’s the guy, that’s the guy sitting in every tavern in America,’ ” said actor and playwright John Lisbon Wood, a friend of Mr. Noose.
Those regular Joe looks won Mr. Noose a long career in ads and in roles meaty and minor on TV shows from “Barney Miller” (Pete, Siegals Security, 1975) to “Punky Brewster” (Cemetery Guard #1, 1987).
A resident of Chicago’s Northwest Side, Mr. Noose, 79, died of complications from lung cancer on Monday, April 26, at Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital in Barrington, said his daughter Karel Munao.
He was a good natured-scamp from his childhood in Pilsen, she said. His father hit the road for long stretches and Mr. Noose proved too much for his mother, who made him enlist in the Army when he was 15. He served in Hawaii and got his GED, returned to Chicago to marry a girl he had known since boyhood, and then was recalled to serve in Korea.
Life in the barracks suited his gifts for camaraderie and a profitable proposition — “You’d propose a deal, and he was in,” his daughter said.
“Like in the movies, he’s the one guy that’s a con artist and that’s always making money,” she said. “He’d send [money] to my mother and she’d say, ‘Where the hell did you get this?’ He’d say, ‘Don’t ask.’ So she bought a car.”
After working a few jobs, he became a police officer and took well to his assignment shepherding traffic downtown. “He was the king of State Street,” his daughter said.
But after that first beer commercial, his acting career gradually took over, and he left the department sometime in the mid-1970s.
Acting “became very steady and it became really good,” his daughter said. He took voice lessons and studied acting, eventually writing a book on the subject. About the same time he left the police force he moved to Burbank, Calif., returning to Chicago a couple of times a year.
He had the gap in his front teeth fixed, but maintained his streetwise charm. He was, in fact, quite well-read and curious on a range of issues. He led his children on expeditions to find the Lost Dutchman Mine in Arizona and invented a device he dubbed the “Chicago Fire” to light up charcoal for barbecues.
Industrial films, voiceover work, and print and film ads kept him busy. He guided in a plane with a coned flashlight for a United Airlines commercial, danced on the back of a cereal box for Kellogg’s, and sat in a bathtub for Lava soap, according to Wood and his daughter.
His television parts were steady as well, slowing in the 1990s but continuing up until 2001 when he played Dr. Ortiz in an episode of “Walker, Texas Ranger.”
Returning to Chicago in the mid-1990s, he made the rounds of various bars and could be found most days at Fast Freddy’s diner at the Jefferson Park transit station, sparking spirited conversation and grabbing tabs for old pals and new friends.
“Twenty-seven years, best customer I ever had,” said Freddy Emini, the diner’s owner.
Wood explains Mr. Noose’s appeal. “That’s the secret, he was never an actor. He was just a regular guy.”
Mr. Noose also is survived by his wife, Rita; a son, Theodore; a brother, Terry; and four grandchildren.
Services were held.
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