• Born: Jun 22, 1952 in Six Nations Reserve, Ontario, Canada
• Occupation: Actor
• Active: '90s-2000s
• Major Genres: Drama, Comedy Drama
• Career Highlights: Thunderheart, Dances with Wolves, The Education of Little Tree
• First Major Screen Credit: Dances with Wolves (1990)

Biography

A full-blooded Oneida from the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, Canada, actor Graham Greene is best known for playing Native American roles; his characters are almost always positive and very dignified. Though he has provided a strong role model and has proved that there is a place for Native American actors outside the Western genre, he considers himself neither a spokesperson for Native rights, nor a great trail blazer paving the way for other Native American actors in film and television. Instead Greene prefers to think of himself simply as an actor capable of playing any role that comes his way, and indeed, in the rare instances when he is cast in other parts, such as that of a New York detective in Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995), he excels.

Unlike other performers, Greene did not grow up with a burning desire to act. Rather his becoming an actor was literally due to the luck of the draw. It happened in the early '70s when he was working as a sound engineer for a popular Canadian band. One of his cohorts thought Greene might make a good actor, but Greene was indifferent. They discussed the matter for a week before they decided to cut a deck of cards. If he lost, he would become an actor. Shortly thereafter, Greene found work on the London stage. It took almost a decade of hard work -- he made his feature film debut in the 1983 sports drama Running Brave -- before he made a name for himself with his Oscar-nominated performance as Kicking Bird in Kevin Costner's epic directorial debut Dances With Wolves (1990). Following his success with Costner's film, Greene became a guest star on various television series, notably L.A. Law, Murder She Wrote, and Northern Exposure, where he had a recurring role as a medicine man/teacher. He also appeared in the PBS American Playhouse production Where the Spirit Lives (1990) and in the well-wrought HBO film The Last of His Tribe (1992). In 1992, he also was excellent as a Sioux policeman who acts as a foil/teacher to starchy FBI agent Val Kilmer in Michael Apted's Thunderheart (1992). In addition to a continued but sporadic film career that included the 1997 Canadian release Wounded, in which he played a recently rehabilitated alcoholic detective who helps solve the murder of a slain forest ranger, Greene appeared on-stage -- most frequently in Toronto -- and did television work that included hosting documentaries. In March of 1997, Greene was reportedly hospitalized following a several hours-long stand-off with Toronto police. Depressed over family and other personal matters, Greene was suicidal and according to the person who called the police, he had guns in his home, though no weapons were used during the encounter which ended peacefully. Greene shares his name with a renowned British author and essayist. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

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A film actor who has found success in both Canada and the United States, Graham Greene (born 1952) is a full-blood Oneida, born on the Six Nations Reserve in southwestern Ontario in the early 1950s.

Graham Greene, one of the most visible Native American actors working on the stage and in film today, is probably best known for his roles in the popular films Dances with Wolves and Thunderheart. Greene was the second of six children born on the Six Nations reserve near Brantford, Ontario, to John, an ambulance driver and maintenance man, and Lillian Greene. At the age of 16, Greene dropped out of school and went to Rochester, New York, where he worked at a carpet warehouse. Two years later he studied welding at George Brown College in Toronto, then worked at a Hamilton factory, building railway cars. In the 1970s Greene worked as a roadie and sound man for Toronto rock bands and ran a recording studio in Ancaster, Ontario. He has also worked as a high-steelworker, landscape gardener, factory laborer, carpenter, and bartender.

Greene took his first acting role (a Native American) in 1974 as part of the now-defunct Toronto theater company, Ne'er-Do-Well Thespians. In 1980 he played a Native American alcoholic in The Crackwalker by Judith Thompson, and in the 1982 theater production of Jessica, co-authored by Linda Griffiths, he played the role of The Crow. In the 1980s Greene worked with the Theatre Passe Muraille, acting in an "irreverent set of plays, The History of the Village of the Small Huts." When not acting, he welded sets and worked lights.

The first film role Greene took came in 1982 in the movie Running Brave; he played a friend of Native American track star Billy Mills. Two years later, in 1984, Greene played a Huron extra in Revolution, a movie about the U.S. War of Independence which was shot in England and starred Al Pacino. In the meantime, Greene had a daughter by Toronto actress Carol Lazare in 1981. The death of his father in 1984, however, started what Greene described in a Maclean's interview with Brian D. Johnson as a "period of fast cars and guns." Moving to the country around the same time, Greene found himself out of work and selling hand-painted t-shirts in Toronto by 1988.

Events took another upward turn in 1989 when Greene played a cameo role as Jimmy, an emotionally disturbed Lakota Vietnam veteran, in PowWow Highway. That same year he received the Dora Mavor Moore Award of Toronto for Best Actor in his role as Pierre St. Pierre in Cree author Tomson Highway's play Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing.

Lands Key Role in Dances with Wolves

Greene's largest film success came with the 1990 production of Dances with Wolves; the role of Kicking Bird, a Lakota holy man who befriends Kevin Costner, brought Greene an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor in 1991. And Greene's personal life moved forward at the same time. While shooting Dances with Wolves, he married Hilary Blackmore, a Toronto stage manager. As his film career took off, Greene continued his theater work, playing "a toothless, beer-guzzling Indian buffoon" in an all-native cast of Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing. Television also came into the picture in 1990 when Greene played a Navajo lawyer in "L.A. Law," and Leonard, a Native American shaman, on the series "Northern Exposure."

Apart from his supporting role in Dances with Wolves, and his brief cameo appearance in PowWow Highway, Greene is probably most popular for his role as the mystical, murderous, Native activist Arthur in the 1991 Canadian movie Clearcut, based on Toronto writer M. T. Kelly's novel A Dream Like Mine. Two other movie roles that display Greene's acting talents were undertaken by the actor in 1992: the role of Ishi, the last Native American in California to live completely apart from U.S.-Anglo culture, in the made-for-television movie The Last of His Tribe; and the role of Lakota tribal policeman Walter Crow Horse in Thunderheart, a drama loosely based on events in Oglala, South Dakota, in which two FBI agents were shot and killed.

Also among Greene's more recent works is the 1991 adventure movie Lost in the Barrens; the role of a baseball catcher in the 1992 TNT movie Cooperstown with Alan Arkin; the role of an Anishinabe/Ojibway grandfather living on the reservation in the made-for-television children's movie Wonder Works Spirit Rider; the Native mentor in Huck and the King of Hearts-a loose and modern adaptation of the adventures of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn; a local sheriff in the movie Benefit of the Doubt with Donald Sutherland; and a role in the film Maverick with Mel Gibson, Jody Foster, and James Garner.

Greene's future is also full. He appears in the movie of Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water, and in the television movie The Broken Chain with other Native actors Wes Studi, Eric Schweig, and Floyd Red Crow Westerman. Overall, Greene has had roles in over 13 stage performances and more than 30 movie and television productions.

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