Info
- Full Name: John Noble
- Date of birth: August 20, 1948 (78 years old)
- Location: Port Pirie
- Country: Australia
- Height: 1,85m
John Noble has been active for 24 years, participating in 6 movies that average a 6.4/10 score.
Biography
He didn't make a film until he was forty. John Noble had spent the two decades before that running theatre companies in Adelaide, which is a long way from anywhere that hands out film roles. When the screen work finally arrived, it brought him two characters people can quote from memory: a maddened steward in Middle-earth and a scientist with a laboratory cow.
Port Pirie, Adelaide and the stage
He was born on 20 August 1948 in Port Pirie, a smelter town north of Adelaide in South Australia. Theatre got him early and kept him.
Between 1977 and 1987 he was artistic director of the Stage Company of South Australia, and he also worked at the Adelaide Festival Centre and on the city's festival. He took a production to the Edinburgh Festival in 1979. He directed, produced, taught and acted, all within Australia, with nobody abroad much aware of him.
His film debut came in 1988, in a horror picture called 'The Dreaming'.
The Steward of Gondor
A phone call from New Zealand changed things. Peter Jackson cast him as Denethor in 'The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King' (2003). He also turns up in the extended cut of 'The Two Towers'.
His best known scene lasts three minutes: Denethor tearing through a meal while he sends his son off to die, with Billy Boyd singing underneath it. The cast took the Screen Actors Guild ensemble award.
Walter Bishop
Television gave him the part of his life five years later. In 'Fringe' (2008-2013), the science fiction series produced by J.J. Abrams, he played Walter Bishop, a brilliant scientist sprung from a psychiatric institution to work impossible cases, alongside Anna Torv and Joshua Jackson.
He carried it for a hundred episodes, and once the show moved into parallel universes he started playing the cold, calculating version of the same man as well. It won him a Critics' Choice Award and a Saturn, but never the Emmy nomination his viewers spent years demanding.
Villains and a very low voice
Unsettling men have kept coming since. He was Henry Parrish in 'Sleepy Hollow' (2013-2017) and Morland Holmes, Sherlock's father, in 'Elementary', a billionaire his son loathes for good reason.
The films have come in patches: the Russian gangster in 'Running Scared' (2006), the dragon spirit in 'The Last Airbender' (2010), the grandfather in 'Silencio' (2018) and the retired priest in 'The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It' (2021).
That voice of his has become a trade in itself. He has been Unicron, the planet that eats planets, in 'Transformers: The Last Knight' (2017), the Scarecrow in the Batman Arkham games, the property magnate in 'L.A. Noire' and Odin in 'Twilight of the Gods', the animated series Zack Snyder made for Netflix in 2024.
Bones, family and the current work
He was diagnosed with osteoporosis in 2012 and set up Noble Bones, a charity to get people talking about a condition that rarely gets discussed, least of all when it turns up in men.
He is married to Penny and they have three children; one of them, Samantha, acts too. He splits the year between Sydney and New York.
At 78 he is still in demand. In February 2025 he appeared in the second season of 'Severance' as Cecil Fields, husband to Christopher Walken's character, in one of the most talked-about episodes of the run. A year later he joined the second season of 'The Last Thing He Told Me', the Apple TV+ thriller led by Jennifer Garner, which started in February 2026.
Last appearances: movies and tv shows
- Highest-rated movie: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) 9.2
- Lowest-rated movie: The Last Airbender (2010) 4.2
- Highest-rated tv show: The Blacklist (2013) 8.9
- Lowest-rated tv show: Cowboy Bebop (2021) 6.5