Born June 22, 1952 on the Six Nations Reserve in Ohsweken, the son of Oneida 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 concertgoers.
Kelly Jay of the rock group Crowbar suggested Greene try acting; intrigued, he started auditioning, debuting as a Native called Grey Sky in “The Black Curse”, a 1979 episode of the Ontario-shot series The Great Detective (1979-82): “I changed into the costume, and they put me in the shade in a nice chair. They brought me food and water, and I thought, ‘Jeez, I’m living the life of a dog! This is great. I don't have to carry anybody’s amplifiers anymore.’”
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, flatfooted 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 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), though tellingly HBO’s promotional material centred 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), where 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 with the ensemble of 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-). Most encouragingly, as he turned seventy, there was a run of episodes in FX’s Reservation Dogs (2021-23), an acclaimed coming-of-age comedy created by Native writer-directors.
There were still characters called Lightfeather (King Ivory, 2024) or Old Smoke (the Stallone-led Tulsa King, 2024), yet these were but one string on his bow: Greene also essayed a talking crabapple 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). He was awarded the Order of Canada in 2015; his final role was in the thriller Ice Fall (2025), released later this year.
Asked whether he’d ever felt overly typecast, Greene said: “I played 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.”
He is survived by his wife Hilary Blackmore, whom he married in 1990, and their daughter Lilly Lazard-Greene.
Graham Greene, born June 22, 1952, died September 1, 2025.
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