Graham Greene (1952–2025)

Graham Greene, who has died aged 73, was a prolific Canadian-born character actor best known for an Oscar-nominated role that drew heavily on his First Nations heritage: that of Kicking Bird, the Native American chieftain extending the hand of friendship to paleface Kevin Costner in the romantic modern Western Dances with Wolves (1990).

A member of the Oneida nation, he was born on June 22 1952 on the Six Nations Reserve in Ohsweken, Ontario - the son of paramedic John Greene and his wife Lillian. Greene took a roundabout route to acting: as a young man, he worked as a welder, draughtsman, as a recording studio technician and then as a roadie, where he entertained colleagues by inventing stories about concert-goers.

Kelly Jay of the rock group Crowbar suggested Greene try acting; intrigued, he started auditioning, and made his debut as a Native American called Grey Sky in “The Black Curse”, a 1979 episode of the Ontario-shot series The Great Detective (1979-82).

He soon graduated to films, landing supporting roles in Running Brave (1983), a biopic of Billy Mills, the Native American winner of the 10,000m at the Tokyo Olympics; in Hugh Hudson’s period misfire Revolution (1985); and as a Vietnam vet in Powwow Highway (1989), an indie starring Gary Farmer, Greene’s second cousin once removed.

By the time of Dances with Wolves, Greene was only in his late thirties, yet his chieftain projected a drolly craggy, hand-me-down wisdom. The role demanded the actor both learn the Lakota dialect and feign some proficiency with horses; to achieve the chief’s awkward, flat-footed posture, Greene took to placing slices of bologna sausage in his shoes.

The film’s success saw Greene hired to portray various facets of the Native American experience, beginning with a tribal lawyer in “Dances with Sharks”, a 1991 episode of L.A. Law. He won a rare title role in the telemovie The Last of His Tribe (1992), although tellingly HBO’s promotional material centred on his Caucasian co-star Jon Voight; he bolstered Michael Apted’s reservation-set procedural Thunderheart (1992) and amused as a canny shaman on TV’s Northern Exposure (1990-95).

For a while, Greene was multiplex cinema’s most prominent indigenous face, even if the material proved as daft as the Mel Gibson gambling romp Maverick (1994) or Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), in which he played one of Bruce Willis’s NYPD sidekicks. A severe depressive episode led to a suicide attempt in 1997, but Greene recovered, sharing a Grammy in 2000 for the spoken-word children’s album Listen to the Storyteller.

In the streaming era, Greene got a second wind. He was the villainous Malachi Strand in Netflix’s Western serial Longmire (2012-17), casino boss Littlecrow in Prime Video’s legal drama Goliath (2016-21) and a funny, humanising presence amid HBO’s doomy The Last of Us (2023-). As he turned 70, there was a run of episodes in FX’s Reservation Dogs (2021-23), an acclaimed coming-of-age comedy created by Native American writer-directors.

There were still characters called Lightfeather (King Ivory, 2024) or Old Smoke (the Stallone-led Tulsa King, 2024), but these were just one string to his bow: Greene also essayed a talking crab-apple tree in the Canadian kids’ series The Adventures of Dudley the Dragon (1994-97) and Corin in an all-male As You Like It (2019). His final role was in the thriller Ice Fall (2025), released later this year. In 2015 he was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2015.

Asked whether he had felt typecast, Greene said: “I play​ed an old Jewish man in a furniture store in theatre, I played the ghost of a black transvestite. I’ve played French soldiers, I’ve played New York cops, I’ve played lawyers, so... no.”