Graham Greene was an icon of Hollywood cinema and Canadian theatre | Canada Voices

A thousand years ago, a play of mine – a comedy – was being produced in a small university town in Illinois. We were working on a short scene where a long estranged Indigenous father is talking with his daughter about how the rules of family can sometimes not have happy endings.

“I understand. It’s not like the way it is in the movies, is it?” the daughter asks.

“No,” he replies, “Graham Greene isn’t here.”

As we worked on the scene, I heard the dramaturge say quietly to the director regarding the line, “What is it with Canadian Indigenous people and that British novelist?!”

Yes, there was a time not that long ago when Graham Greene wasn’t as well-known as he is today. These days, in many corners of the world, he’s much more familiar than that British guy who wrote Our Man in Havana and The Quiet American.

An Oneida of the Six Nations Reserve in Southern Ontario, Greene was an actor who spanned many mediums and genres of the storytelling venues. He was a movie star, a television performer and an accomplished theatre artist. Before all that, he sampled the world as a welder, draftsman, steelworker and an audio technician before being urged to try acting and finding his true home.

My life and his intertwined many times in the previous century. For a period in the 1980s, he was the executive director of the Association for the Native Development of the Performing and Visual Arts, a Toronto-based Indigenous arts support service. On occasion I would find myself sleeping on their boardroom floor when I was between apartments.

Actor Graham Greene dead at 73

Another time I went out for a beer with him, and we found ourselves at a bar, sitting with the remaining original members of the Byrds, who were performing in a concert hall nearby. That could only happen with Greene. He could talk to a garden full of marble statues and get stories out of them.

Another time, I was the writer-in-residence for a theatre company named Native Earth Performing Arts, I was attending the rehearsal of a little play called Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing written by Tomson Highway. It was there I saw Greene in his full glory, strutting the stage as Pierre St. Pierre, a role that many would argue put Greene on the map.

The play is seldom produced these days for several reasons, but his portrayal of that lovable drunk and hockey referee told me what a true actor can achieve. He would disappear into the character, creating unique elements that helped construct the persona he morphed into.

And if I remember correctly, many of the actors had to take a few hours off rehearsal one afternoon, as there was a major film company in town holding auditions for a movie. It was some Kevin Costner film. A Western called Dances with Wolves. The rest, as they say, is history.

With Greene’s portrayal of Kicking Bird, and the subsequent Oscar nomination, his life changed.

But Greene never gave up theatre, working in such groundbreaking Canadian plays as The Crackwalker and The History of the Village of the Small Huts. More recently, he strode the stage at Stratford, where he lived for the last few decades of his life. There, he is remembered for his outstanding performances in Of Mice and Men, and of course as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.

But perhaps it was his work in film that cemented his popularity in the consciousness of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Movies including Clearcut, Twilight, Maverick, The Green Mile, Pow Wow Highway and Thunderheart showed fans the diversity and complexity of Greene’s acting, and of Indigenous characters in general. All of this at a time when Indigenous people were not commonly seen on the big screen.

For the most part, westerns, the main films that depicted Indigenous characters, were dead and sometimes it seemed there were no Indigenous people in the modern world. Many credit Greene with opening doors for other Indigenous actors, writers and directors, showing them how to storm the world of settler cinema.

It’s important to note it wasn’t just Indigenous-themed movies that he excelled in. For many Indigenous actors, it’s frequently a great delight to play non-Indigenous actors. Greene was no different. In fact, it could be said a good portion of society would more than likely recognize him from many of his more mainstream appearances, such as Die Hard with a Vengeance and Transamerica.

He was also a mainstay on television, playing such a broad spectrum of characters, in shows such as The Adventures of Dudley the Dragon, Northern Exposure, The Red Green Show, Longmire, The Last of Us and Reservation Dogs. In fact, I believe I first met him on the set of a 13-part children’s series that was shot three hours north of Thunder Bay, called Spirit Bay. It was 1985, and I was a young production assistant immediately captivated by his amazing and constant sense of humour.

An absurd joke of his or a simple wry comment was better than a strong cup of coffee to start the day.

Once I ran into him in Toronto as we were walking into Harbourfront. Very casually, he reached into his pocket and pulled out three colourful marbles that he rolled around in his hand. Very dryly, he said, “Contrary to popular rumour, I still have them.” It took me a moment for it to sink in, then I laughed.

In 1991, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing was being remounted at the Manitoba Theatre Centre, and I flew out to see it. Greene was recreating his role of Pierre St. Pierre. I was backstage before the show, congratulating everyone when I heard Greene’s voice calling out to me. I turned to see him in full costume, including a furry hat with ear flaps. “Drew! Drew! What do you think?”

With that, he produced a look of shock and dismay, at the same time pulling a string in his pocket making the ears of the hat pop up like a curious dog. It was pure Graham.

Whether the joke was cheap or sophisticated, Greene didn’t care. It was the destination, not the journey.

Tom King, the renowned author and friend of Greene, perhaps put it best: “We were in Calgary filming Medicine River. There was a guy who had come from Toronto to interview Graham about the movie. He caught Graham after a long hard day of filming and began asking him a bunch of inane questions. Towards the end, he asked Graham what was his most embarrassing moment and Graham smiled and said it was talking to him. He didn’t suffer fools. He ate them.”

An icon has passed. I know that’s said frequently about a lot of people who have moved on but to us who have circled in his orbit, it’s true. To many, he was the consummate actor. The good friend. The passable golfer. The owner (with his partner Hilary) of many cats.

Thank you, Graham, for doing all that you did. And allowing us to join the ride.