Noble Johnson (April 18, 1881 – January 9, 1978), later known as Mark Noble, was an American actor and film producer. He appeared in films such as The Mummy (1932), The Most Dangerous Game (1932), King Kong (1933) and Son of Kong (1933).
Biography
Johnson was born in 1881 in Marshall, Missouri. He was of African-American ancestry. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado. At age fifteen, Johnson left school to help his father, a horse trader, with work. In 1909, Johnson entered the film industry. Standing 6'2" and weighing 215 pounds, Johnson had an impressive physique that made him in demand as a character actor and bit player. In the silent era, he assumed a wide variety of characters of different races due to his lighter complexion. While Johnson was cast as black characters in many films, he also played Native American, Arab, and Asian parts. [1]
Noble was good friends with fellow actor Lon Chaney, his schoolmate in Colorado.[2] He was also an entrepreneur, founding his own studio, Lincoln Motion Picture Company, in 1916 in Omaha, Nebraska, with his younger brother George Perry Johnson. The Lincoln Motion Picture Company was an African-American film company (apart from director Harry A. Gant) that produced what were called "race films", movies made for the African-American audience, which was largely ignored by the "mainstream" film industry, and was 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 investing his pay from those films in Lincoln. The Lincoln Motion Picture Company moved to Los Angeles in 1917 and became defunct in 1922.
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 through his extraordinary commitment to African-American filmmaking. However, he reluctantly resigned as president in 1920 because he could no longer continue his double business life, maintaining a demanding career in Hollywood films while trying to run a studio.
Johnson died of natural causes on January 9, 1978, in Yucaipa, California. He is buried in the Garden of Peace at Eternal Valley Memorial Park in Newhall, California.
