Graham Greene

Graham Greene was Oneida, born in Ohsweken, Ontario, and worked for more than fifty years across film, television and theatre. International attention arrived late and all at once, with Kicking Bird in Dances with Wolves in 1990, a part that earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and immediately threatened to define what Hollywood would offer him for the rest of his life.

He escaped that trap by being funnier and stranger than the roles asked for. Kicking Bird is a holy man written with reverence, and Greene gave him a dry, faintly exasperated intelligence that made him a person instead of a symbol. Then he took work with no relation to it at all: a New York detective in Die Hard with a Vengeance, a scene-stealing turn in Maverick, a condemned man in The Green Mile, broad comedy in Snow Dogs, and a long run of Canadian television including North of 60 and The Red Green Show. Whatever the register, he plays it at the same unhurried tempo, which is how he keeps taking scenes off actors who are working much harder.

The late career is the good one. Wind River in 2017 gave him a tribal police chief with no illusions left, and Reservation Dogs and Echo used him as an elder statesman for a generation of Indigenous filmmakers who grew up watching him. Canada eventually loaded him with honours: a Grammy, Gemini and Canadian Screen Awards, the Order of Canada, and the Governor General's Performing Arts Award in 2025. He died that September, still working.