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Graham Greene attends the unveiling of his Canada’s Walk of Fame 2021 commemorative plaque for Arts & Entertainment at Beanfield Centre, Exhibition Place in December, 2022, in Toronto.Mathew Tsang/Getty Images
Remembered by colleagues and friends as generous, humble, mischievous and a great cook, Graham Greene was, above all, a versatile actor whose career spanned half a century and broke down racial stereotypes of Indigenous people as violent aggressors or victims.
Probably best known for his role as Kicking Bird, a Sioux tribal leader in Kevin Costner’s 1990 epic film Dances with Wolves, Mr. Greene was a trailblazer in presenting Indigenous characters with human complexity and depth.
“The thing about the film is it’s not anything to do with changing history or anyone’s values, it’s showing relationships between people,” Mr. Greene said in an interview with U.S. television.
“There is good and bad in every race and nation in the world, everyone knows that. [The film] is just people getting along with people. And I think that’s fantastic and I was glad to be part of it.”
In his review of Dances With Wolves, Globe and Mail critic Jay Scott described Mr. Greene’s character as a “phenomenally intelligent shaman, but he’s too wily and witty to be categorized as a clichéd medicine man.”
The movie earned Mr. Greene an Academy Award nomination, opening more opportunities for young Indigenous actors in Hollywood.
“Greene was a trailblazer for First Nations representation in film and television, opening doors for generations to come,” the Six Nations elected council said in a statement after his death “He shared the stories and resilience of our people in every role he played,” elected Chief Sherri-Lyn Hill said. “Graham brought pride to our community and his legacy will continue to be honoured and inspire future generations.”
His long list of film credits includes Thunderheart (1992), Maverick (1994), Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), The Green Mile (1999), The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) and Wind River (2017). He also appeared on television and on stage.
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Kevin Costner, left, and Graham Greene, right, in a scene from Dances With Wolves.The Canadian Press
Mr. Greene died Sept. 1 in Stratford, Ont., at age 73 after a long illness.
Born to John Greene, a paramedic and maintenance man, and his wife, Lillian, on June 22, 1952 in Ohsweken, on the Six Nations reserve near Brantford, Ont., Graham Greene was a member of the Oneida Nation.
As a young man, he moved to nearby Rochester, N.Y., then Hamilton, Ont., then Toronto, working as a carpenter, carpet layer, welder, ironworker and bricklayer. He also worked as a sound technician for musicians such as Buck Owens and Reba McEntire.
He resisted getting into acting but was coerced by a friend who had a script he wanted Mr. Greene to consider.
“At the time, I was a recording engineer and I said ‘acting, that’s for sissies, get away from me,’” Mr. Greene said in a television interview in the late 1980s with CTV host Valerie Pringle.
“He bothered me all week with the script and finally, at the end of the week, we cut cards and I came up with the two of clubs. I did the project and found out, ‘Hey this is fun, this is great to tell stories and that’s one of my joys.’”
Mr. Greene performed on stage for several years, including touring a play around high schools in Northern Ontario. In an interview with CBC’s Tom Power, Mr. Greene recalled lying on the stage with a fake arrow in his chest and a student in the front row yelling, “Die already!”
He was part of the original cast of Cree writer Tomson Highway’s award-winning play Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, which opened at Toronto’s Theatre Passe-Muraille in 1989.
Set in a fictional reserve in Northern Ontario, Dry Lips is written in a mix of English, Cree and Ojibway and tells the story of seven men on the reserve who band together to protest an all-girls hockey team. It’s about societal change and is full of conflict on many levels, with anger and violence initially portrayed as farce.
Mr. Greene played the role of Pierre St. Pierre, a good-humoured drunk, which earned him the Toronto theatre community’s Dora Mavor Moore Award for outstanding performance by a male in a leading role.
It was a videotape of Mr. Greene’s performance in the play that caught the attention of actor and director Kevin Costner, and Mr. Greene was invited to Los Angeles for a meeting and audition for Dances With Wolves.
Mr. Greene’s most memorable television roles came after that film, when he was a frequent guest star on Northern Exposure, a popular, quirky comedy about a New York doctor assigned to work in a remote community in Alaska, and The Red Green Show, a sketch comedy show featuring handyman projects and duct tape.
One of Mr. Greene’s close friends was fellow actor Tom Jackson, whom he met while doing a play in 1986; the two shared the stage again years later in Dry Lips. Mr. Jackson and his wife, Alison Jackson, who live in Calgary, often visited Mr. Greene and his wife, the actor and stage manager Hilary Blackmore, at their home in central Ontario, just south of Lake Simcoe.
“My most enjoyable moment with Graham was when I met him at his place in Udora and we went fishing on a little pond out back of his place,” Mr. Jackson recalled. “We sat with a little six-pack of sarsaparilla and a couple of fishing rods and cast lines out into the water, but they didn’t have any hooks on them, they only had weights, so they’d sink. But there was no fish in the pond, so it didn’t matter.
“We talked about what we wanted to do that we hadn’t done and one of those things was Star Trek.
When Mr. Jackson got a guest appearance in the seventh episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation, he called his old friend from the set.
“I said, ‘You’re never going to believe where I am,” Mr. Jackson recalled. “I’m in the captain’s chair.”
The two couples often ate together, with Mr. Greene wearing the chef’s apron and preparing elaborate meals consisting of several courses and seasoned with herbs from Ms. Blackmore’s garden.
“He probably invented the word ‘foodie’,” Ms. Jackson wrote in an email.
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Graham Greene in October, 2021.BRYAN R. SMITH/Getty Images
Mr. Jackson remembers asking Mr. Greene once if he had named the two geese that seemed to have taken up residence on the family pond. With his wry wit, Mr. Greene replied, “Of course. One is Thanksgiving and the other is Christmas.”
Colleagues often got to experience that same sense of humour on sets.
Make-up artist Sallyann Sexton met Mr. Greene in 1985 while working on the film Revolution, starring Al Pacino.
“We took a lot of helicopters to the many inaccessible locations and as they would come into sight, Graham would hum the M*A*S*H theme tune,” Ms. Sexton wrote on Instagram. “Ever since, I have thought of him whenever I hear it, with a smile.”
Tantoo Cardinal, who played Kicking Bird’s wife, Black Shawl, in Dances With Wolves, also remembers Mr. Greene’s mischievous sense of fun.
In a scene in the movie where the two are in bed and about to make love, Mr. Greene pulls a child’s doll from under the covers, ruining the romantic moment. The doll wasn’t part of the script and Mr. Greene had placed it there himself, as a wink to the challenges of maintaining an intimate relationship while raising young children.
“He had a superpower in being able to find much needed laughs in unlikely places,” Ms. Cardinal said in an email. “I hope he is enjoying the download of his life in the Great Beyond and breathing a deep satisfaction in having contributed his lot of fine moments.
“They are much appreciated.”
The American actor Ethan Hawke also wrote on Instagram that working with Mr. Greene was “shockingly fun.”
“He improvised brilliantly and infused every moment with spontaneity and humour.”
Mr. Greene will appear in two episodes later in the season of the forthcoming series The Lowdown, starring Mr. Hawke.
He played some serious roles, such as tribal officer Walter Crow Horse in the western thriller Thunderheart and Arlen Bitterbuck, an Indigenous man on death row in The Green Mile.
Mr. Greene played a New York City detective alongside Bruce Willis, in Die Hard With a Vengeance, one of the highest-grossing films of the mid-1990s. But, for once, his character wasn’t Indigenous, which opened the doors for other Indigenous actors to see they didn’t have to be pigeonholed into Indigenous roles.
Ms. Cardinal said Mr. Greene was fortunate to have had a path already cut by his predecessors, such as Chief Dan George, who portrayed Old Lodge Skins opposite Dustin Hoffman in the 1970 film Little Big Man, Gordon Tootoosis, who played in Call of the Wild, and George Clutesi, who starred in the 1973 made for TV movie I Heard the Owl Call My Name.
In April 2017, Mr. Greene addressed an audience in Charlottetown on the topic of kindness at a series of talks sponsored by the Walrus magazine.
“I believe we all desire a better Canada,” he said, after mentioning the lack of housing, clean water and health care for some. “It seems pretty easy, [kindness] doesn’t cost anything, just a smile, a little patience and tolerance.
“Say good morning to a stranger or someone who is new to Canada because Canada is their home too.”
Besides accolades on the stage or screen, Mr. Greene had many other accomplishments, including being invested in the Order of Canada in 2016; modelling for a Gap print ad in 1991; and, just months before his death, he received the Governor-General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement.
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Governor General Mary Simon, right, presents actor Graham Greene, left, with the Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award during the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, on June 13.PATRICK DOYLE/The Canadian Press
Along with his friend Mr. Jackson, he hosted the National Aboriginal Achievement Awards in 1998, Canada Day on Parliament Hill in 1992 and Halo High Water – a fundraiser they organized for flood relief in Calgary in 2013.
He also joined Mr. Jackson on the annual Huron Carole Cross Canada tour in 1997 to raise funds for food banks across Canada.
Kaniehtiio Horn, the Mohawk director of the horror film Seeds, first discovered Mr. Greene through his 1991 film Clearcut, about logging on Indigenous land and the subsequent kidnapping and torture of a logging executive by Mr. Greene’s revengeful character.
On her Instagram account, Ms. Horn recounted how she introduced herself to Mr. Greene at a film screening by telling him how much she and her family loved Clearcut, which she had watched several times as a child.
“‘Whoa, that’s pretty dark’, he said and chuckled. I think he dug that I was straight up with him and his stardom didn’t make me act all weird,” she wrote.
The two kept in touch over the years via email, with “Uncle G” providing advice and guidance as the young filmmaker navigated through what can be a very competitive industry.
She was astounded when he agreed to be in her movie, in which he was cast as her spirit guide.
“He was like ‘Whatever you need, my niece’,” she wrote. “I remember thinking it was so cool that he blasted classical music in his trailer [on set].
“What an absolute legend we just lost.”
Mr. Green leaves his wife, Ms. Blackmore; Lilly Lazare-Green, his daughter with Carole Lazare; and grandson, Tarlo Greene.
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