But the New Jersey native's uncanny ability to empathize with his characters, regardless of their differences, brought a tender sense of realism and compassion to his work, and to his life.
It's one of the many things that his friends and family will miss about Mr. Cole, the Roxbury writer who died at his home Feb. 23 after a prolonged and valiant fight against multiple myeloma. He was 75.
"He has written movies and plays that really touched people different from him," said his daughter, Sarah Rose Cole. "It's those things that made him a truly incredible friend with other writers and everybody in town."
Ms. Cole recalled with reverence how her father's courageous, and unprecedented eight-year long fight against the disease made him a pillar for his cancer support group.
Indeed, others looked to Mr. Cole for guidance in the battle. Strength was another of his valued, and valuable, traits. Even in his final days, his wife, the noted filmmaker and director Joyce Chopra, said his "ending was with grace," adding, "I don't know if I could do that."
Ms. Chopra and Mr. Cole met in 1965. They married four years later, on Dec. 21, the first day of winter.
"Why we picked that day, I'll never know," said Ms. Chopra, who spoke through her shock, just one day after his death.
At the time of their wedding, Mr. Cole, a 1954 graduate of Harvard College, was a Russian and English literature professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a job he held for about a decade.
Before that, Mr. Cole entered the U.S. Army, where he learned Russian in the Army Language Program. After traveling to the Soviet Union, where he served as an interpreter at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow and witnessed the famous "Kitchen Debate" be­­tween Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev, he returned to Harvard to earn a master's degree in Russian, which then yielded him the position at MIT.
While teaching, he met his good friend A.R. "Pete" Gurney, a fellow college professor and acclaimed playwright.
"He was a very talented man in a number of areas; an excellent writer who wrote good short stories, movies and plays, and a first-rate teacher ... he was very popular with the students," Mr. Gurney said. "Anybody that knew him was impressed by him."
Mr. Cole left the teaching profession to pursue his dream of writing. Among his many notable works are Medal of Honor Rag," Mr. Cole's play based on the true story of the black Vietnam vet who committed suicide after winning the Congressional Medal of Honor.
He also wrote the screenplay for "Smooth Talk," the film about a teenager who falls prey to a smoothing-talking man that launched the career of Laura Dern. "Smooth Talk," which was directed by Ms. Chopra, won the Grand Jury Prize for the Sundance Film Festival in 1986. New York Times critic Vincent Canby named it one of the year's 10 best films.
Ms. Dern, then just a teenager, has said she was able to feel Mr. Cole's sense for entering the characters.
The actress credited Mr. Cole with the "innate sensibility to empathize with every aspect of the human experience," and the ability to "bring his characters to an urgently vivid reality, for all of us, as if he had lived their lifetime."
He created some of his best work after moving to Litchfield County in 1979, first to Kent and then Roxbury. His time here wasn't all work, though. During his time in Roxbury, he was an active member of the Roxbury Scholarship Fund and the town's Historic District Commission.
And as he had always done, he played tennis. Even after his diagnosis, he could be seen on the court batting around the yellow ball.
"He was such a great player, and he much enjoyed being part of the team," said his daughter, who added her father was part of the Washington Tennis Club. "He was a real sought after partner."
Mr. Gurney also commented on his friend's stellar capabilities on the tennis court. Unfortunately, in Mr. Cole's final years he competed less, but, according to Mr. Gurney, this highly educated man who could speak four languages became somehow even more attentive to his environment.
"As he got sicker and moved closer to mortality, he became more aware of the world around him," said Mr. Gurney. "If he heard a bird call, he could identify it immediately, or he would notice the bud on a tree ... or the shape of a rock."
He continued, "I think that was his legacy. With him, I learned to look at the world more carefully and respond to it more carefully."
Tom Cole-a perceptive writer, a solid friend and humanitarian and a proficient teacher to the end.