Hail And Farewell To Graham Greene

Sad news from Canada: Oscar-nominated First Nations actor and C&I reader favorite Graham Greene passed away in a Toronto hospital Monday, September 1, after a lengthy illness. He was 73.

The widely respected stage, screen and television veteran, whose lengthy resume spans from his Oscar-nominated performance as Kicking Bird in Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves (1990) to his playfully robust portrayal of Skully, the title character’s grandfather, in the Marvel TV series Echo (2024), was inducted just last April into the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum’s prestigious Hall of Great Western Performers.

Among his many other notable credits: Walter Crow Horse,  a tribal police officer who reluctantly aids an FBI agent (Val Kilmer) investigate a murder on a South Dakota reservation in Thunderheart (1992); NYPD detective Joe Lambert, an ally of the resourceful hero John McClane (Bruce Willis) in Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995); Malachi Strand, a corrupt former police chief in Longmire (2014-17); and tribal police chief Ben Shoyo in Wind River (2017).

“He was a great man of morals, ethics and character and will be eternally missed,” Greene’s agent Michael Greene said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. “You are finally free. Susan Smith is meeting you at the gates of heaven,” referring to the actor’s longtime agent, who died in 2013.

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Greene appeared in so many movies and TV shows during his decades-long acting career that he was long accustomed to being recognized in public. Trouble is, he told C&I in a 2021 interview, some folks who approached him couldn’t remember why they recognize him.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’ll have people come up to me and say something like, ‘Hey, where do I know you from?’ And when they do, I’ll usually say, ‘Man, just Google it.’”

Mind you, Greene chuckled when he said that. Because, really, even he recognized that he had played such a wide variety of characters that admirers and autograph-seekers might find it difficult to recall precisely where they have seen him before.

“Sometimes,” he added, “someone will come up and say, ‘Hey, man, you were great in such and such a movie. I really loved you in that.’” Pause. “But I was never in it.”

Greene earned the respect of his collaborators on either side of the camera — both for his immense talent and his status as a bona fide living legend.

“Working with Graham was a dream come true,” said Echo executive producer and co-director Sydney Freeland, a member of the Navajo Nation. “And talking about representation for myself growing up — anytime there was a Native American person in front of the camera, it was exciting. It was an event no matter how small or how big that portrayal was. And I think Graham Greene in Dances with Wolves was such a seismic shift forward in representation. So to have the chance to work with him was absolutely amazing and incredible.”

Johnathon Schaech, who starred opposite Greene in the INSP-produced movie Blue Ridge, said he was “very excited” when he learned who he would be on location with. “I’ve worked with a lot of great actors,” Schaech said, “and he was incredibly professional. He was uncertain of me until I got in there with him. And then he could see that I was, number one, a professional myself, but also very seasoned, very present. And Graham was as present, if not more present than I.

“Every scene I worked with him, I wanted my character to be tough, but I also really wanted him to be vulnerable and very open and caring for people. I would listen to Graham and what he was saying beyond just the words of the script. And he got me very emotional many times. I was very, very connected to Graham Greene.”

Graham Greene co-starred with Elizabeth Olsen in Wind River.

.If you look closely at Greene’s resume, you may be struck by how often he made an indelible impact in movies where he had a minimal amount of screen time. In Transamerica, writer-director Duncan Tucker’s marvelously empathetic 2005 road movie, he has only a few scenes as Calvin Two Bears, a sweet-natured rancher who’s drawn to a trans woman (played by Independent Spirit Award winner Felicity Huffman) a few days before the operation that will complete her transformation, but he makes every moment count. (He even gets to strum a guitar and warble “Beautiful Dreamer.”) And in writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s Molly’s Game (2017), he steals scenes simply by appearing firm but fair as the judge overseeing the trial of a woman (lead player Jessica Chastain) charged with operating illegal high-stakes poker games.

“Aaron, the director, was looking at me sitting behind the bench,” Greene told True West magazine. “I had a puzzled look on my face. He said, ‘Are you all right?’ I said, ‘Yeah. I’ve just never seen the bench from this side before.’”

Greene was born in June 1952 in Ohsweken, on Canada’s Six Nations Reserve. He began his acting career in the theater, and was appearing in professional stage productions by the 1970s.

One of his career highlights: He played Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Lennie in Of Mice and Men in repertory at the 2007 Stratford Shakespeare Festival. “I was doing Merchant of Venice at one theater in the afternoon, then going to another theater at night and doing Of Mice and Men.

“Mice and Men was an incredible production. And nobody could get tickets for it. It was sold out.”

Greene thoroughly enjoyed the diversity of roles he played throughout his career. “I’ve played cops, I’ve played soldiers. I played a judge in Molly’s Game. I played God twice. I played the Archangel Gabriel. I guess that’s pretty much got me covered.

“You know,” he added, “I’ve been killed in over 50 pictures. So it’s funny. Most times, I just flip through the script and find out, okay, I’m dead. Then I just take the rest of the script, and throw it away. Don’t need it.

Some other highlights from our 2021 interview with Graham Greene:

C&I: Even after you’ve appeared in movies and TV shows  all these years — and earned an Oscar nomination for your role in Dances with Wolves — do people still confuse you with the famed British author Graham Greene?

Greene: [Laughs] By now, I think pretty much everybody knows that he died. But there was a time when I got letters from some professors of English. This was back when we just had fax machines. They faxed me questions like, “When people read your books, what do you prefer us to be doing? What kind of wine should we be drinking? What kind of weather should it be outside?” All that sort of thing. I sent them back some ridiculous answers. The type of wine? Lots of it. Weather? Pouring down rain, but high winds.

C&I: I’ve often asked actors what they think they learned from working with certain people. What do you think you learned from working with Kevin Costner?

Greene: Persistence. He didn’t give up. I believe he mortgaged his house to finish [Dances with Wolves]. I remember when we were in Washington D.C., and I think that's where the film was first shown. And about a minute and a half into the film, the projector bulb blew out. So he was out in the lobby, having a panic attack. I thought we would all throw up. So I told him, “Kevin, go start it from the beginning. Nobody’s going to say anything. Nobody will know, don't worry about it.” And that’s what happened.

C&I: What do you think was the best piece of advice you got when you were starting out as an actor?

Greene: Don’t leave your wallet at the dressing room, make sure your fly’s done up, and get an alarm clock.

C&I: And what do you say when young actors ask you for advice?

Greene: You got to have the urge. I have kids today ask me, “I’d like to become an actor, I have a degree, what do I have to do now?” And I say, “Learn how to wait tables, and get your cabdriver license.” You don't just walk in and start acting.

A buddy of mine, we’d been in the business — I don't know, maybe 20 years or so. And this kid was sitting in the theater where we hung out in Toronto and he said, “You know, I’ve been out of acting school for two years. I should be in Hollywood making movies right now.” And we both laughed at him. You’ll never get there with that attitude. You’ll never get there.

Graham Greene is survived by his wife, Hilary Blackmore, and his daughter Lilly Lazare-Greene.