Graham Greene, best known for his Oscar-nominated performance in Dances With Wolves, died on Monday in Stratford, Ontario, at 73. The Canadian First Nations actor died in the hospital after a long illness, according to his agent Michael Greene.
“He was a great man of morals, ethics and character and will be eternally missed,” Greene, no relation, said in a statement (via The Hollywood Reporter). “You are finally free.”
Born June 22, 1952 in Ohsweken, on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, Canada, Greene happened into acting after working various other jobs. He helped to run the Centre for Indigenous Theatre Program, and performed in professional theater throughout the 1970s. Greene made his small-screen debut on the 1979 Canadian drama series The Great Detective. His first film role was in the 1983 biopic Running Brave.
“I started out as a carpenter, a welder, a draftsman, a carpet layer, a roadie and an audio tech,” Greene told Reader’s Digest Canada in 2018. “I stumbled into acting and I thought, ‘These people keep me in the shade, give me food and water, take me over to where I say what I’m supposed to say, then they take me back. Wow—this is the life of a dog!’”
Greene’s Hollywood breakthrough came when Kevin Costner cast him as real-life Lakota Sioux medicine man Kicking Bird in Dances with Wolves, a epic Western adapted from Michael Blake’s novel. The performance earned Greene an Oscar nominated for Best Supporting Actor and helped to launch his Hollywood career. In the years that followed, Green appeared in films like Thunderheart, Maverick, Die Hard with a Vengeance, The Green Mile, Molly’s Game, and Twilight Saga: New Moon.
More recently, Greene appeared in high-profile TV shows like Taika Waititi’s FX series Reservation Dogs, hit series The Last Of Us, and Taylor Sheridan’s 1883 and Tulsa King. He also starred as Skully in Marvel’s Echo series on Disney+.
Although Greene became famous for portraying an indigenous character, the actor made efforts to embrace a variety of roles. After making Dances With Wolves, Greene told his agents to pursue other types of projects to ensure he wasn’t pigeonholed as a performer.
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“I tend to move along in my career and take roles that are unique and different,” Greene said in 2021. “I’ve played God twice. I’ve played judges, lawyers, doctors, police officers, and detectives. The diversity of roles is what I like to play. I don’t like to be pigeonholed as one thing because you get stuck in one role. Jack Nicholson is hired to be Jack Nicholson. I don’t want that, and not being able to experience the other workings of what’s going on in a writer’s head and taking a script and lifting a story off the page and telling it your way.”
Throughout his career, Greene won numerous accolades, including the Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album For Children for Listen to the Storyteller in 2000. He received the Earle Grey Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Order of Canada and the Governor General’s Award. He continued to work until his death. His final film, thriller Ice Fall, which co-stars Joel Kinnaman, is yet to be released.
Greene’s co-stars and peers remembered the actor following his death. “Heartbroken. Terribly saddened to hear of the passing of Graham Greene at only 73,” Lou Diamond Phillips wrote on X. “From Wolf Lake to Longmire, we had a beautiful friendship. An Actor’s Actor. One of the wittiest, wiliest, warmest people I’ve ever known. Iconic and Legendary. RIP, My Brother.”
From Rolling Stone US
