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VITAL STATS
Real Name: Noah Strausser Speer Wyle
Occupation: Actor
Place of Birth: Hollywood, Calif., USA
Education: Attended the Thatcher School (a boarding school in Ojai, California)
Relations: Companion: Tracy Warbin (makeup artist); father: Stephen Wyle; mother: Marjorie (a.k.a. Marty) Spiro Katz; stepfather: James Katz; siblings: Alex, Aaron (also has three stepsiblings); godfather: Mandy Patinkin

CONTACT:
Fan Mail: C/O IFA Talent Agency
8730 Sunset Blvd. 490
Los Angeles, CA 90069
USA

BIOGRAPHY
NOAH WYLE seems so squeaky-clean you almost can't believe it. As surgical resident Dr. John Carter on television's E.R., Wyle projects the unending earnestness of a Boy Scout trying to please. Wyle may look and act the eager beaver, but he isn't as much of a Richie Cunningham as you might imagine. He saw some eye-opening things growing up in Hollywood, and he's a bit more street-smart than his hesitant small-screen alter ego. He's spent his requisite share of time on a shrink's couch, and--horrors!--he smokes. A lot. Not that Wyle has suffered too cruelly under the yoke of the nice-guy image--for one thing, he has accumulated a huge following of female idolaters, though he often jokes that a fair share of his fans' missives are penned with crayon ("I'm sweet, wholesome, dependable, and apparently, not like any guy in their high school," Wyle has commented of his appeal to the braces-and-lip-gloss set). Hey, we can't all be George Clooney, a fact noted with fond derision by Wyle's own mother, who commented of her son's prepubescent coterie, "George gets racy pictures; Noah gets 'Here's me and my hamster.'"

The angel-faced Wyle was born the middle of three children to an electrical engineer father and an orthopedic nurse mother, and he grew up smack-dab in the middle of the very block where both Hugh Grant and Joey Buttafuoco met their personal Waterloos. His parents divorced when he was still quite young, and Noah and his siblings lived for the most part with their mother and her second husband, James Katz, a well-known film restorer; occasionally, Katz's three kids from his first marriage would join the brood as well. (Hmmm . . . sounds like a great plot for a sitcom, doesn't it?) Wyle enjoyed a relatively happy childhood: he nursed aspirations of becoming a professional basketball player, until his bubble was burst by his best friend, Mitchell Butler, who convinced him that sawed-off Jewish kids from L.A. don't generally make it to the N.B.A. It was probably a good thing Wyle was disabused of the notion that he had athletic talent, as it was later disclosed that he was known as "The Quaalude Kid" for his slow performance on the playing field. At any rate, Butler wound up playing for the Washington Bullets, and Wyle, well, he became a professional of an entirely different ilk. He attended an exclusive boarding school, where the flames of a desire to act were fanned by appearances in a number of plays (one of which, a production of Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit, he also directed) and a Thorton Wilder Award for a play he wrote. During his junior year, Wyle attended an invitational program in theatre arts at Northwestern University, an experience that cemented his resolve to become an actor at graduation time. He besmirched the school's spotless college admissions record by eschewing his acceptance to the University of Southern California in favor of acting lessons and a fleabag apartment back on Hollywood Boulevard.

Wyle earned his SAG card with his first acting assignment, in a TV miniseries called Blind Faith, which starred Robert Urich. (His screen time was trimmed down to one fleeting walk-on during which he delivered the stunning line, "Hey, excuse me. What's going on down there?") He didn't exactly rocket to the top of his chosen profession following his debut--in fact, for a time, Wyle redefined the struggling in "struggling actor." Small roles in forgotten features and a TV movie--as the son of an archetypal dysfunctional family in Crooked Hearts, as a Nazi Youth leader in Swing Kids (apart from playing the troll in an elementary school production of Three Billy Goats Gruff, his only villain role to date), and a role as Sir Lancelot in a feminist retelling of the Arthurian legend called Guinevere of Camelot--trickled his way, and an early career high point came with an entirely respectable, if minute, part in Rob Reiner's A Few Good Men.

To say he was an out-of-work actor wasn't exactly true--after all, he did have a job as a busboy in a Los Angeles restaurant, where he was eventually promoted to waiter. Luckily, deliverance from that noble profession wasn't long in coming. His agent set him up with an audition for what he thought at the time was to be a two-hour movie, and Wyle passed three separate auditions with flying colors. But when he found out that the part he had won was in a television series, he nearly declined the offer out of a fear of commitment to a five-year contract. In the end, he took the job of idealistic medical student John Carter on Michael Crichton's hour-long serial hospital drama E.R. with the thought that at least he could line his pockets with six episodes' worth of pay before the show got canceled. Wyle jumped in with both feet, working so hard on the series--all the actors had to attend a so-called "Gentile School of Medicine" to learn how to spout off arcane medico jargon and act in manners technically appropriate to emergency rooms--that the realization that E.R. had become, practically overnight, the most popular drama on television was slow to dawn on him. (The show boasted the highest-rated first season of any dramatic series since Charlie's Angels' debut in 1976.)

Away from the E.R. set, Wyle's avocations include playing pool (one interviewer referred to him as "a postmodern Minnesota Fats in Gap khakis") with castmates Clooney and La Salle, reading about the Civil War, and collecting arks--as in Noah's ark. Wyle also acts as a spokesperson for the Skin Cancer Foundation.

No one will dispute that Noah Wyle has come a long way from his Billy Goats Gruff days. Though having your picture taped lovingly to the inside of junior-high lockers all over the U.S. must certainly hold its share of joys, it remains to be seen if the twenty-six-year-old actor will transcend the young resident heartthrob image that suits him so well, or succumb to the agonizing Ted Danson Syndrome of the hopelessly typecast TV actor he so dreads. Though big-screen dealmakers have already come knocking, Wyle has been wary of rising to the bait (as he sagely puts it, "I wouldn't pay to see me kicking anybody's ass"). He did, however, wrap production on the indie feature The Myth of Fingerprints, which co-stars Julianne Moore and Blythe Danner (otherwise known as Gwyneth Paltrow's mom), and recently signed to portray Adolph Hitler's right-hand man in the film The Populist. With a couple of years remaining on his E.R. contract, he has taken the justifiable stance that, as a young pup, he has time on his side. To date, Wyle has been most excited about his appearance on an episode of Sesame Street, a gig that offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with his idol, Big Bird.