Jay Silverheels
Acting
Born 1912-05-26
Died 1980-03-05
Six Nations Reservation, Brantford, Ontario, Canada
84 credits
Read biography
Jay Silverheels was born on a reservation in Canada to a Mohawk chief. He was a star lacrosse player and a boxer before he entered films as a stuntman in 1938. He worked in a number of films though the 1940s before he gained some notice as the Osceola brother in Humphrey Bogart's film Key Largo (1948). Most of his roles consisted of bit parts as "Indian." In 1949, he would work in a movie called The Cowboy and the Indians (1949) with another "B movie" actor named Clayton Moore. It was later that same year that Jay would be hired to play the faithful Indian companion, Tonto, in the television series "The Lone Ranger" (1949). This role, while still playing the "Indian," would bring Jay the fame that his motion picture career never did. As Tonto, on his horse Scout, Jay could show up where the Ranger could not and some of the time he would be shot at or beat up for his trouble. Jay would play Tonto in all the episodes except for those that he missed when he had his heart attack. In those episodes, he was replaced by the Ranger's nephew, Dan. However, Clayton Moore would miss the third season when he was replaced by John Hart. Jay would reprise the role of Tonto in two big-screen color movies with Moore, The Lone Ranger (1956) and The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold (1958). After the series ended in 1957, Jay could not escape the typecasting of Tonto. He would continue to appear in an occasional film and television show, but he would become a spokesman to improve the portrayal of Indians on TV.
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Filmography
— top 60 of 84
Acting
57 credits
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
The Virginian
Rawhide
Daniel Boone
Wanted: Dead or Alive
The Lone Ranger
The Brady Bunch
True Grit
Pistols 'n' Petticoats
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Gunslinger
Broken Arrow
Key Largo
The Sea Hawk
The Lone Ranger
Yellow Sky
Western Union
The Movie Orgy
Alias Jesse James
One Little Indian
Saskatchewan
The Battle at Apache Pass
The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing
Red Mountain
Passage to Marseille
Tulsa
Smith!
Northern Pursuit
Last of the Comanches
Captain from Castile
Yankee Buccaneer
Lust for Gold
War Arrow
Lost in a Harem
The Phynx
Four Guns to the Border
Family Honeymoon
Brave Warrior
The Half-Breed
Santee
Masterson of Kansas
Drums Across the River
Kit Carson
Walk the Proud Land
Valley of the Sun
Too Many Girls
The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold
Fury at Furnace Creek
The Wild Blue Yonder
The Cowboy and the Indians
Hudson's Bay
Pistols 'n' Petticoats
Texas John Slaughter: Geronimo's Revenge
The Prairie
I Am an American
This Woman Is Mine
The Feathered Serpent
Other credits
3 credits
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