Tara Lynn Wilson

Noth was born November 13, 1954, in Madison, Wisconsin, the youngest of three boys, to news reporter Jeanne Parr (1924–2016). Parr was one of the first female correspondents for CBS News, and host of her own CBS talk show The Jeanne Parr Show. His father was Charles James Noth (1922–1966), a marketing-company vice president and insurance agent who was a naval aviator in World War II and served as Ensign on the USS Antietam during the Korean War. Charles came from a wealthy family in Chicago, and his mother had Irish ancestry that traces back to Knockbride in County Cavan.

Noth's family settled in Stamford, Connecticut, when he was five. Noth grew up in Connecticut while his parents worked in New York City. His parents separated when he was 9 or 10, and his father died in a car accident in 1966 when he was 11. According to Noth, "losing my father left a crater in my life" and he found father figures in many teachers and certain friends of his mother's. While Parr was working as a CBS news reporter in New York during the 1960s, Noth often got into trouble. He was into vandalism and was smoking marijuana and driving at a very young age. During Parr's brief second marriage, the family moved to southern California in 1969, returning to New York in the early 1970s. Noth said that he started taking LSD with friends at age 15, once walking into someone else's house in Newport Beach while high and jumping naked off their pier into the water.

After Noth took a neighbor's car for a joyride and it rolled into another neighbor's house, his mother sent him to an all-boys boarding school (Storm King School) where he spent his freshman year (1968-1969). Noth persuaded his mother to let him leave Storm King School to attend an experimental coed school called The Barlow School in Dutchess County, New York, instead. Poet-dissenter Peter Kane Dufault taught American history at the school. Noth said Dufault was the best teacher he ever had, "He opened up a way of life to me, a life of the imagination; he showed us ... that life can be developed and explored through poetry". For Noth, this school with young artist teachers "for many of us, not relating to our parents, it became our real home", and although "the academics were a little shaky", this art school, with no grades, completely changed his life to focus on the arts. By 1973, he was "totally into being a hippie" with long hair. After graduation, he moved to Brooklyn with his girlfriend when he was eighteen, and worked at a school for the mentally disabled.

Noth attended Marlboro College in Vermont, originally intending to be a writer or poet. He received a classically oriented education and studied English literature and religion. Although the college did not have a theatre department, he discovered acting after joining the repertory theatre company to get out of Latin class. He first appeared on stage in the play She Stoops To Conquer, where he enjoyed the audience's unexpected laughter. After acting in a production of The Zoo Story by Edward Albee, his goals were set on becoming a stage actor. After graduation, he was eager to perform in The New York Repertory Theatre but found that there was not much work for young actors in New York after arriving in late 1978. The first and only job he could get was as a daytime bartender at the Only Child Restaurant, not realizing there was a brothel above the basement pub. He was accepted into the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre to study with acting teacher Sanford Meisner. He stayed in maid's rooms for little or no money in exchange for cleaning the house on a weekly basis. The school did not allow students to work in the theatre, and Noth was expelled after a photo appeared of him in The New York Times acting in a 1979 Manhattan Theatre Club play about an IRA bombing victim. He also studied script analysis with Stella Adler.