The notion that Kevin Costner’s Oscar-winning directorial debut Dances With Wolves (1990), set during the US civil war, was somehow radical or revisionist in its take on the western, tended to come from people who hadn’t seen many westerns.
It did depart from precedent in one respect, however, by using Native American and First Nations actors to play its Sioux and Pawnee characters, with much of the dialogue delivered in the Lakota language with English subtitles. The most impressive of these performers was Graham Greene, who has died aged 73.
Costner was not intending to cast Greene after his first audition until the casting director Elisabeth Leustig prevailed upon him to reconsider. Greene recalled: “Elisabeth and the girls ganged up on Kevin and said, ‘This guy’s right for the part, you’ve got to hire him, he’s a very experienced actor.’”
Experienced but not fluent. “It took three months to learn the dialogue,” he told True West magazine in 2021. “I had no idea what I was saying and I had to learn it phonetically. I’d be running 10 miles a day with my headphones on, listening to the translations, mumbling away in Lakota, and people were looking at me funny. But I got it down.”
Greene, an Oneida who grew up on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, starred as Kicking Bird, the Sioux holy man who accepts Lieutenant Dunbar, a white Union lieutenant played by Costner, into his community and forms an alliance with him. The film was steeped in sentimentality, but Greene brought an effortless integrity, as well as humility and a dry wit, to his performance.
That humility thrived off-screen as well. When the Oscars shortlist was announced in early 1991, Greene’s best supporting actor nod was one of 12 nominations the movie received. (It eventually won seven prizes, including best picture.) In the same week, he was starring in an Ottawa production of Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, by the Indigenous Canadian writer Tomson Highway. Aghast to discover that the theatre marquee was now adorned with the words “starring Oscar nominee Graham Greene”, the actor demanded their removal. “Take it down,” he said. “It’s not about me.”
Though he did not win the Oscar, Dances with Wolves accelerated his career, which was already a decade old by then. Significant roles followed in films including Michael Apted’s thriller Thunderheart (1992), with Val Kilmer and Sam Shepard, and the comic western Maverick (1994), with Mel Gibson. He was an NYPD officer in the Bruce Willis action sequel Die Hard With a Vengeance (1995), and found himself on the other side of the law in the mystical death row drama The Green Mile (1999) starring Tom Hanks.
He was a rancher coming to the aid of a transgender woman (Felicity Huffman) in Transamerica (2005), and a tribal elder in The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009). He also played a judge in Aaron Sorkin’s drama Molly’s Game and a tribal police chief in Wind River (both 2017), a thriller about a murder on an Indian reservation.
Each of these roles represented a broadening of opportunities for Greene personally and a more general move away from old pervasive stereotypes. “I’m tired of being mystical and stoic,” he said in 1992.
When he first worked in Hollywood, he recalled being “handed scripts and you’d have to speak the way they thought Native people spoke. In order to get my foot in the door, I did it; I went along with it a little while. ‘Ok, you gotta look stoic. And don’t smile … And stand there like this’ [folds arms and tilts head back]. And grunt a lot.’”
Matters improved but there was still prejudice to overcome, even after that Oscar nomination. Explaining why he wasn’t going to cast him in Crimson Tide, the 1995 thriller set on a nuclear submarine, the director Tony Scott told Greene: “I can’t see a Native American on a sub.”
After pointing out that, in fact, he had four uncles who had worked on submarines, Greene exited the audition room. Asked later how he dealt with that kind of attitude, he was sanguine. “Just let ‘em go … I’m not gonna chase you round, saying ‘Oh, Mr Scott, I really need this role!’ To hell with you.”
Describing himself as a “passive activist”, he tended not to be drawn into wider debates about representation. He told the Orlando Sentinel in 1992 that he was “[not] a big political animal. I don’t care what’s going on with politics. I have too much trouble worrying about my mortgage and how to run my fax machine properly.”
He was born in Ohsweken in Ontario, to John Greene, a paramedic, and his wife, Lilian. He later moved to Hamilton and took various jobs: carpenter, carpet layer, welder, ironworker, bricklayer, roadie.
His first taste of acting came in the early 70s when he agreed to help a friend workshop a script. He then studied at the Centre for Indigenous Theatre in Toronto in 1974 and did stage work for several years, getting his first TV roles at the end of that decade.
He made his film debut in Running Brave (1983), which starred the Jewish Texan Robby Benson as the Indigenous athlete Billy Mills. After the success of Dances with Wolves, Greene starred in several episodes of the whimsical TV series Northern Exposure in 1992 and 1993.
In a later series, Longmire (2014-17), he indulged his fondness for playing villains. “They said, ‘He’s a bad guy’,” Greene recalled of the day he was offered the role of Malachi Strand. “I said, ‘Oh goodie!’” In seven episodes of Goliath (2019), he played a menacing casino boss suspected of turning into a crow at night. “Being nice all the time, it’s boring,” Greene reasoned.
More recently, he played Corin in an all-male version of As You Like It (2019) shot in Death Valley. He starred in Taika Waititi’s TV comedy-drama Reservation Dogs and in the acclaimed adaptation of the zombie videogame The Last of Us (both 2023). In the comic horror film Seeds (2024), Greene played himself, reimagined as the host of a true-crime series and the protagonist’s spirit guide into the bargain.
Kaniehtiio Horn, the director of Seeds, first saw Greene in the 1991 film Clearcut. “He was playing this playful, badass character,” she said. “He was one of the first roles that I think we saw where we could actually cheer for the Indigenous character as he enacted some revenge. It was really cathartic … for a lot of Indigenous people.”
In June, Greene was presented with the Canadian governor general’s award for lifetime artistic achievement. Always ready with advice for younger actors, he recommended a grounding in theatre “because you’ve got to learn discipline or you won’t last very long. They ask, ‘How did you last this long, Mr Greene, 40-some years?’ And I say, ‘I’ve got a thick skin and a hard head.’”
He is survived by his wife, Hilary Blackmore, and a daughter, Lilly, from another relationship.