Rodd Redwing

Roderic Redwing (born Webb Richardson; August 24, 1904 – May 29, 1971) was an American trickshooter, stunt performer, and actor known for his work in Western films. He was known as a top gun, knife, tomahawk, whip, and drill instructor in the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Rodd Redwing
Born
Webb Richardson

(1904-08-24)August 24, 1904
Tennessee U.S.
DiedMay 29, 1971(1971-05-29) (aged 66)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
OccupationActor
Years active1912-1970
SpouseErika Rosa Wagner

Though he presented himself as Chickasaw Native American, he was actually African American without any known Indigenous ancestry, a fact not widely-revealed until after his death.

Biography

Redwing was born Webb Richardson on August 24, 1904, to Black parents in Tennessee.[1] His father, Ulysses William Richardson (b. 1873), was an elevator man. His mother, Lillian Webb (b. 1878), was a manicurist and hairdresser.[2] Lillian divorced her husband William in 1920.[3] Webb moved to New York to attend New York University and pursue a career in acting and appeared in the 1929 musical Malinda in Greenwich Village, with a cast of African American performers.[4]

Webb later changed his name to Roderic ‘Rodd’ Redwing, adopted a fictive Native American identity (a phenomenon known as Pretendian), and reported his birthplace to New York City. Such a deception was not uncommon in early 20th-century America, where Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance (born Sylvester Clark Long) had fooled New York high society.[5] He claimed his mother was from a Chickasaw reservation in Oklahoma, and this father was a stage actor. Some sources reported that he used the Hindi-sounding name Roderick Rajpurkaii Jr. and said his father was a Brahmin mind reader from India.[6]

As Redwing, he was one of the top gun, knife, tomahawk, and whip instructors in Hollywood. After claiming that he began in films in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1931 Western The Squaw Man (although no cast list shows that he acted in that movie), Redwing soon became a gun-handling coach to Alan Ladd, Ronald Reagan, Burt Lancaster, Glenn Ford, Richard Widmark, Anthony Quinn, Charlton Heston, Dean Martin, Fred MacMurray and many other actors. He performed Alan Ladd's fancy gunspinning seen in the film Shane during the climatic showdown.

Between 1951 and 1967, Redwing appeared in more than a dozen television programs, including a guest appearance on CBS's celebrity quiz show, What's My Line?

In eight episodes of the television series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Redwing appeared in the part of "Mr. Brother," a Cheyenne friend and informer of deputy Marshal Wyatt Earp.[7][8]

Death

After filming his part in Red Sun, Redwing died at the age of 66. On a flight from Spain to Los Angeles he suffered a heart attack and died 35 minutes later, just before the plane landed. The urn containing his ashes was buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

Filmography

References
  1. Rodric Redwing, U.S. Social Security Act, Application for Account Number, 27 February 1937. On the U.S. 1930 Census, New York, Webb said both he and his father were born in Tennessee and his mother in Mississippi, 7 April 1930.
  2. World War One Draft Registration Card for Ulysses Richardson, 12 September 1918, retrieved from Ancestry.com
  3. Chattanooga News, 1 May 1920.
  4. New York Times, 4 December 1929, p. 40. See also Aleiss, Angela (2022), Hollywood's Native Americans: Stories of Identity and Resistance, Santa Barbara CA: Praeger, p. 94, 178, ISBN 978-1-4408-7156-6
  5. admin. "Buffalo Child Long Lance". Native America: A History. Retrieved 2023-04-23.
  6. "Rod Redwing of Hollywood is Newest Actor". The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. August 2, 1949. Retrieved July 31, 2016.
  7. "Rodd Redwing". Internet Movie Database. Retrieved May 15, 2014.
  8. "Rico Alaniz". Internet Movie Database. Retrieved May 15, 2014.

See also
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