George Burns, Charlton Heston, Alanis Morissette, Morgan Freeman: the list of performers who have played the Judeo-Christian God on the big screen is a list both selective and eclectic. Perhaps the first actor to tackle the part was an imposing figure whose booming voice served him on the stage and in movies and TV, a voice which certainly put one in mind of the Almighty. Not only that, but he was also a groundbreaking medical student and a licensed physician. And he was African-American.
Pioneering actor Rex Ingram (not to be confused with an Irish-born director of the same name) was born in a houseboat on the Mississippi River near Cairo, Illinois, in 1895. The son of a riverboat fireman, the young Ingram devoted himself to his studies and graduated from Northwestern University’s medical school, the first Black man to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key there. Moving west to California, he worked a variety of jobs from sailboat crewman to would-be boxer before Fate took a hand in 1918. “My career as an actor was quite by chance,” Rex once recounted. “I was standing on a Hollywood corner waiting to cross the street when I was discovered by a movie talent scout. I was persuaded that I was just what was needed to play a native of the jungles in the first Tarzan pictures.”
After making his Hollywood debut in 1918’s Tarzan of the Apes alongside Elmo Lincoln, Ingram racked up small roles in such films as Cecil B. DeMille’s silent The Ten Commandments (1923) and The King of Kings (1927); the first sound version of The Four Feathers (1929); opposite Paul Robeson in The Emperor Jones (1933); and the following year in the lost Oscar Micheaux all-Black drama Harlem After Midnight. With non-stereotypic roles in Hollywood hard to find, Ingram moved to New York City in 1928. His Broadway debut came a year later in Lulu Belle, followed by turns in numerous other plays, including Edwin DuBose Heyward’s Porgy, the drama which George Gershwin later transformed into Porgy and Bess.
Ingram’s big break came in 1936, when Warner Bros. signed him to play “De Lawd” in their elaborate movie version of the hit Broadway play The Green Pastures. Depicting several Old Testament stories in a 1930s rural Southern setting, The Green Pastures was one of a handful of all-Black features made during Hollywood’s Golden Age. Along with Ingram playing God and Adam, the film also starred Eddie “Rochester” Anderson as Noah, Oscar Polk as the angel Gabriel, and Myrtle Anderson as Eve. Meant to be a uplifting expression of faith, it’s now seen as a well-intentioned but condescending depiction of Black culture. Nevertheless, it was also a major box office success. In 1939 Rex was cast as Jim in M-G-M’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with Mickey Rooney in the title role. In an interview with Ebony magazine, the actor explained how he hoped that his portrayal of the escaped slave trying to reach his wife and family in the North “spelled out in theatrical terms the powerful message of human brotherhood.”
Ingram’s biggest screen role–from a physical standpoint–came courtesy of British filmmakers the Korda brothers in their lush Technicolor remake of The Thief of Bagdad. As the towering, blue-skinned, thunder-voiced Djinn who is freed from his bottle prison by title rapscallion Abu (Sabu), Ingram is at once a jovial and menacing figure, threatening to crush Abu under his foot. The wily youth tricks the Djinn back into his bottle, releasing him after he is promised three wishes. It’s basically an extended one-scene performance with only a few minutes of screen time, but Ingram was certainly the most memorable movie genie until Robin Williams came along a half-century later.
Other ’40s film roles for Ingram included a turn as Ronald Colman’s valet in the romantic seriocomedy The Talk of the Town (1942); as a Sudanese Army officer in the Humphrey Bogart WWII actioner Sahara (1943); and, as sometimes happens to actors who play God, as “Lucifer Jr.” in another all-Black studio effort, the M-G-M musical Cabin in the Sky (also ’43). He would again play a giant in a second Arabian-based fantasy, Columbia’s A Thousand and One Nights (1945) and was cast as a swamp-dwelling recluse in the noir-flavored melodrama Moonrise (1948). During this time he also served as narrator for several of animator George Pal’s Puppetoons shorts starring Jasper, an adventurous Black boy. The shorts were popular with audiences but criticized for their racial caricatures.
Ingram’s career suffered a precipitous fall when he was arrested in 1948 under the Mann Act. Charged with transporting a teenage girl across state lines for immoral purposes, the actor pled guilty and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. Released after serving 10 months, Ingram wouldn’t be seen on movie screens again until 1955, an uncredited role as a Zulu chief in– of all things–a Tarzan film, Tarzan’s Hidden Jungle. 1958 found him in supporting roles in two indie dramas, God’s Little Acre and Anna Lucasta (as Eartha Kitt’s father).
In the 1960s Rex played a preacher in the Oscar-winning Elmer Gantry (1960); the childhood musical mentor of country legend Hank Williams (George Hamilton) in the biodrama Your Cheatin’ Heart (1964); a college professor in Otto Preminger’s lurid Hurry Sundown (1967); and (his final film role) as a slave in the Civil War frontier drama Journey to Shiloh (1968). He also appeared in various TV series ranging from Whirlybirds and The Rifleman to Daktari and Gunsmoke. Ingram’s last performance was in a 1969 Christmas-themed episode of The Bill Cosby Show. Two weeks after filming the Cosby episode–a role Cosby personally secured for him–Rex passed away at 73 from a heart attack.