Sex and the City alum Chris Noth has been with Canadian actress and playwright Tara Wilson for two decades. The duo started dating in 2001 and eventually married in 2012.
Tara was born on February 25, 1982, in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. She headed south of the border to study her craft, as she’s a proud graduate of New York City’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Tara eventually landed a role on Law and Order: Criminal Intent in 2004, a year before Chris starred on the show, reprising his role as NYPD Detective Mike Logan, which he originated on the original Law & Order from 1990 through 1995.
The notoriously private couple met while she was working as a bartender at The Cutting Room, a New York City live music club that Chris has owned since 1999. The pair kept their romance undercover for quite some time, as fans previously swooned over him as John James “Mr. Big” Preston on HBO’s Sex and the City.
Chris and Tara welcomed their first child, son Orion, in 2008. The following year, they got engaged, worked together, opened a business and raised their child.
In 2009, Tara appeared in her fiancé’s film, Frame of Mind. The pair then became business partners upon the opening of their teahouse, Once Upon a Teacup, in her hometown of Windsor, Ontario. Another location would follow in London, Ontario.
The couple officially became husband and wife in an April 2012 wedding in Maui, Hawaii. Then-4-year-old Orion even served as his parents’ ring bearer.
After tying the knot, Chris revealed in 2013 that he had received hate mail about his interracial relationship with Tara. “When I was in a play on Broadway two years ago, I’d occasionally get letters of outrage, usually from somewhere in Alabama or something, saying you know, ‘Don’t come down here with your wife,’” he told the Wall Street Journal at the time. But he hoped things would change with time, adding, “We’re all getting together. We’re all mixing it up.” Six years later, Tara would write about race for an original theatrical work.
In 2019, Tara wrote the play B.R.O.K.E.N code B.I.R.D switching, which her alumni page described as a “thought-provoking, timely story touches on marriage, race and how to make peace with complicated choices.” It had a 16-day run at the Stephanie Feury Theater in Los Angeles in November 2019.
Tara told the AADA’s newsletter, “I feel very fortunate that I could use my words to craft this story. It is a story of race and identity, of promise and purpose, but perhaps more importantly, it is the story of the potency of being seen.”
In 2020, Chris became a dad for the second time at the age of 65, as Tara gave birth to their second son. “Down from the heavens comes our second son – Keats!” Chris wrote in his Instagram caption announcing the new baby in February 2020. He also included a reference to a poem by John Keats, giving a possible hint to where the couple came up with the unique name.