Canadian First Nations actor who brought an effortless integrity and dry wit to his starring role in the hit film Dances With Wolves
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.”
