Noble Johnson

Noble Johnson
Born	Noble Mark Johnson April 18, 1881(1881-04-18) Marshall, Missouri
Died	January 9, 1978 (aged 96) Yucaipa, California
Spouse(s)	Ruth Thornton; Gladys Blackwell

Noble Johnson (April 18, 1881 – January 9, 1978) was an African American actor and film producer.

Biography

Standing 6'2" at 215 pounds, his impressive physique and handsome features made him in demand as a character actor and bit player. In the silent era he assayed a wide variety of characters of different races in a plethora of films, primarily serials, westerns and adventure movies. While Johnson was cast as black in many films, he also played Native American and Latino parts and "exotic" characters such as Arabians or even a devil in hell in Dante's Inferno (1924) (the old black and white orthochromatic film stock of the early days was less discriminating about a person's color, as were B+W stocks in general, permitting some African-American actors a break, as their "color" was washed out or less obvious when photographed in black and white. As late as the early 1960s, there were very few African-American members of the Screen Actors Guild, since there was a lack of opportunity for them as black performers were confined mostly to race films until the 1960s). In all his roles, Johnson lived up to his Christian name: his was a noble and dignified presence that exhibited great power and substance.^{[citation needed]}

Johnson also an entrepreneur. In 1916 he founded his own studio to produce what would be called "race films", movies made for the African-American audience, which was ignored by the "mainstream" film industry. The Lincoln Motion Picture Co., which was in existence until 1921, was an all-black company, the first to produce movies portraying African-Americans as real people instead of as racist caricatures (Johnson was followed into the race film business by Oscar Micheaux and others). Johnson, who served as president of the company and was its primary asset as a star actor, helped support the studio by acting in other companies' productions such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916), and using the money he made in those films to invest in Lincoln.

Lincoln's first picture was The Realization of a Negro's Ambition (1916). For four years Johnson managed to keep Lincoln a going concern, primarily due to his extraordinary commitment to African-American filmmaking. However, he reluctantly resigned as president in 1920, as he no longer could continue his double business life, maintaining a demanding career in Hollywood films while trying to run a studio.

In the 1920s Johnson was a very busy character actor, appearing in such top-notch films as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) with Rudolph Valentino, Cecil B. DeMille's original The Ten Commandments (1923), The Thief of Bagdad (1924), and Dante's Inferno. He made the transition to sound, appearing in the 1930 version of Moby Dick (1930) as Qeequoq to John Barrymore's Captain Ahab. He was also the tribal leader on Skull Island in the classic King Kong (1933) (and its sequel, The Son of Kong (1933) and appeared in Frank Capra's classic Lost Horizon (1937) as one of the porters. One of his last films was John Ford's classic She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), in which he played Native American Chief Red Shirt. He retired from the movie industry in 1950.

Johnson died on January 9, 1978, in Yucaipa, California. He is buried in the Garden of Peace at Newhall, California's Eternal Valley Memorial Park. The cause of death was natural causes.

Trivia: Noble was great friends with Lon Chaney. They were schoolmates in Colorado and both ended up in Hollywood making movies.^{[citation needed]}

References

External links

• Noble Johnson at the Internet Movie Database
• Noble Johnson at the African-American Registry
• Noble Johnson at the Horror Film Site