Born in Marshall, Missouri on 18 April 1881, Noble Mark Johnson grew up in a family already known locally for its skill, presence and sheer visibility. His father, Perry J. Johnson, was a respected African-American horse trainer; his mother, Georgia A. Reed Johnson, was white, a detail that would later shape the strange elasticity of his Hollywood casting. One of three brothers (Noble, Virgil and George, plus a sister, Iris), the Johnsons were a well-known Black family in the city, and Noble’s boyhood friendship with Lon Chaney Sr began long before either man stepped in front of a camera.
A 1967 interview with George revealed that he and Virgil both attended school with Chaney, and that Chaney was known by every member of the Johnson household during the period they lived in Colorado Springs. The friendship lasted into adulthood, and Chaney quietly helped Noble secure early work at Universal, one of the very few personal favours Chaney ever extended.
Noble left school at 15 and travelled with his father, riding horses until 1898, when he became a cowboy and began the long procession of jobs that shaped his physicality and his screen presence. Ranching, horse training, mining in 1909, boxing, athletics. All of it fed into the man who would later be cast as everything from tribal chiefs to princes to monsters. His entry into film was almost accidental. While transporting horses to a set, he stepped in for an ill actor and found himself on camera. The industry, not used to the concept of Black actors, took notice. By 1916 he was working regularly, and over the next three decades he appeared in more than 130 films. Universal quickly realised he was more than an actor, and used him as a dependable production troubleshooter on shoots that needed someone who could ride, fall, fight, endure hours of make-up or simply stay calm when everything else was going wrong.
Johnson became the first major Black actor in Hollywood, though fame came with the usual penalties. His imposing 6’2 frame and 215-pound build, combined with comparatively light skin, meant studios treated him as a kind of human wildcard. He appeared as Russians, Indians, Mexicans, Polynesians, Arab princes, Native Americans, tribal leaders, servants, monsters and the Devil. Across roughly 50 films for Universal, he played a Black character in only around three.
Early film stock and make-up helped the illusion, but his horsemanship was the real key. It let him take roles that would otherwise have gone to white actors, and it kept him working in an industry that rarely knew what to do with Black talent. His ability to slip into dozens of ethnicities was noticed by Black audiences at the time, some of whom saw it as a necessary survival tactic, others as a reminder of Hollywood’s refusal to cast darker-skinned actors at all.
His silent-era successes were significant. He appeared in the Rudolph Valentino breakout smash war epic ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ (1921) as the rider of Conquest. In Cecil B. DeMille’s first Biblical colossus, ‘The Ten Commandments’ (1923), he played The Bronze Man, the only Black actor in the cast. The 1956 remake featured more than 100. Johnson developed the gold paint used to cover his entire body, a chemistry trick that allowed him to survive up to 19 hours without the suffocation that ordinarily accompanied such stunts. He appeared as the Indian Prince in Douglas Fairbanks’ ‘The Thief of Baghdad’ (1924) and in the Pre-Code sensation ‘Dante’s Inferno’ (also 1924), which featured nude actresses and visual sequences so dazzling they were reused in the 1935 remake and nearly 60 years later in Ken Russell’s ‘Altered States’.
Despite playing the somewhat critical part of the Devil, Johnson appeared uncredited. He also appeared in a minor role alongside his friend Chaney in Tod Browning’s 1928 film ‘West of Zanzibar’. And tucked among these Biblical epics and fever-dream fantasies sits his appearance in Buster Keaton’s ‘The Navigator’ (1924), a credit that feels almost surreal in context but shows just how far his silent-era reach extended.
By the time he had made the leap to talkies, the roles, though perhaps more developed, still focused more on Johnson’s appearance than his talent. His appearance in ‘The Mysterious Dr Fu Manchu’ (1929) was alongside another actor who struggled to escape typecasting, Warner Oland, best known for his many appearances as Charlie Chan and also the cause of everyone’s problems in 1935’s ‘Werewolf of London’. Further indignity followed when he starred as ‘Janos the Black One’ in the first film adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, released in 1932; like many Poe-based films, the plot skirts timidly around the source material, and Universal was still feeling its way toward what a horror film actually was.
Four films that followed pushed Johnson into the orbit of horror fans and into more substantial roles. ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ (1932), ‘The Mummy’ (1932), ‘King Kong’ (1933) and ‘Son of Kong’ (1933). As the sinister Cossack Ivan in ‘The Most Dangerous Game’, he was subjected to something now almost unbelievable. He was whited-up. In ‘The Mummy’, opposite Boris Karloff, he played the elegant Nubian, obedient and merciless by turns. In both Kongs he appeared as the Tribal Leader of Skull Island. Fun, iconic, but hardly a moral or artistic progression. He played The Zombie in the Bob Hope horror-comedy ‘The Ghost Breakers’ in 1940. He also appeared in ‘King of the Zombies’ (1941), giving him one of the earliest zombie roles in American cinema, long before Romero turned the undead into a genre of their own.
Johnson’s career had other dimensions that rarely get mentioned. He wrote early screenplays, including ‘The Indian’s Lament’ (1917), making him one of the first Black screenwriters in Hollywood. His brother, George Perry Johnson, was a pioneering Black newspaperman and archivist who later founded the Pacific Coast Bureau, an early documentation centre for Black filmmaking. George’s archive eventually went to the University of California, preserving the history Noble helped create. Noble wasn’t just a co-founder of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company. He was its president, and the studio’s films were designed explicitly to counter racist stereotypes. Their debut, ‘The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition’ (1916), cast Black actors in roles of dignity and professional achievement at a time when mainstream cinema was still peddling caricature. Noble used his Hollywood salary to keep the company alive when white distributors refused to carry its films, effectively subsidising an entire alternative vision of Black cinema out of his own pocket.
Most importantly, Johnson co-founded the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, the first Black-American film company, which operated from 1916 to 1921. He often supported the studio by acting in other companies’ films, including ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’ (1916), using his pay to keep Lincoln afloat. His commitment to Black filmmaking was constant, even as Hollywood continued to cast him as every ethnicity except his own. Later Black performers such as Clarence Muse and Paul Robeson acknowledged Johnson’s early presence in Hollywood as meaningful, a kind of quiet blueprint for surviving an industry that refused to imagine Black actors in roles of dignity or complexity.
Johnson essentially drew a veil over his career in 1950, shortly after appearing alongside John Wayne in ‘She Wore a Yellow Ribbon’ as Chief Red Shirt. He made one final appearance in the 1966 TV movie ‘Lost Island of Kioga’ as a hostile Indian. Truly, nothing had changed. He died in Yucaipa, California, in 1978 at the old grand age of 96. In his later years, he lived quietly, rarely discussing his film career, though he occasionally turned up at film society screenings when his early work began to be rediscovered in the 1960s and 70s.
Daz Lawrence
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