I’ll never forget the time I went to interview Graham Greene and he was dressed as a tree.
The Oscar nominated actor (for his role as Kicking Bird in Kevin Costner’s 1990 feature “Dances with Wolves”) could play anything. Besides a tree, as he once told George Stroumboulopoulos, he played “an old Jewish man in a furniture store in theatre; I played the ghost of a black transvestite…I’ve played British soldiers, I’ve played French soldiers, I’ve played New York cops, I’ve played lawyers…”
Look him up on IMDb — 180 acting credits over a career spanning 50-plus years.
So, no, he didn’t just play indigenous characters although he proudly was one as a member of the Oneida Nation from Ontario’s Six Nations of the Grand River. Even then there was tremendous variety to his performances in many movies and TV shows, including Bones of Crows: The Series, opposite Jeremy Renner in Taylor Sheridan’s “Wind River” (2017), with Val Kilmer in “Thunderheart” (1992), as Harry Clearwater in The Twilight Saga and in episodes of Reservation Dogs, Northern Exposure and North of 60.
Nor did he just do drama. Greene was a very droll comedy actor, or even a quietly broad one. He appeared on everything from “Corner Gas: The Movie” to sketches on The Royal Canadian Air Farce. He did 27 episodes of The Red Greene Show and was also in Steve Smith’s “Duct Tape Forever.”
He played a crab apple tree in TVO’s children’s series Dudley the Dragon with the same conviction he brought to playing Sitting Bull on a Heritage Minute. When I spoke with him on the Dragon set, his arms were tree limbs with leaves and he was covered in bark. Greene had such a dry wit it was hard to tell if he was putting me on when he talked about his roots.
advertisement
And he took these goofy little local roles after appearing in big budget Hollywood films such as “The Green Mile” opposite Tom Hanks, or “Die Hard with a Vengeance” with Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson and Jeremy Irons, or in “Marverick” with Mel Gibson. Bless him then, for either not having agents and managers or for overruling them.
Even in declining health, Greene kept acting. He has five 2025 IMDb credits. His recent appearances have been in Tulsa King, The Last of Us and Marvel’s Echo.
He received Walk of Fame and Order of Canada tributes, even a Grammy award for a spoken word recording of the children’s album, “Listen to the Storyteller.” What he represented to the Canadian film and television industries, and to his peers, went beyond awards. From them he earned tremendous respect and admiration, and from audiences too. He was the First among Nations.
Condolences to his wife Hillary Blackmore, daughter Lilly and granddaughter Tarlo and all his family and friends.
