His American mother, Louise, was a Vassar College graduate with a liberal arts education who loved books and lectured widely. Sheffield was born in Pasadena, California, the son of British-born Reginald Sheffield, who had also been a child actor in films, credited as Eric Desmond. Like Weissmuller, Sheffield, who had a physical grace and a carefully arranged loincloth, had to cope with a variety of wild animals, revolting natives and dastardly white adventurers. In the eight Tarzan films he made, from the age of seven to 16, the curly-haired Sheffield followed Weissmuller through the Culver City backlot jungle in California (amplified by stock shots), swimming, vine-swinging and imitating the famous apeman cry. Burroughs, however, complained all the way to the bank. Neither Tarzan, whose dialogue was limited to grunts and monosyllables, nor Boy bore much resemblance to the original characters as conceived by Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose novels portrayed both the apeman, Lord Greystoke, and his son, Jack "Korak" Clayton, as cultivated and articulate. In the Tarzan films, the fact that the orphaned offspring of a British couple killed in a plane crash in the jungle had an American accent was never explained.
"Boy", as he was named, was played by Johnny Sheffield, who has died aged 79 of a heart attack at his California home after falling off a ladder while pruning a tree. However, he had to be a foundling because, according to the Legion of Decency, the scantily clad jungle couple were not married, and presumably never had sex. After three hit Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller in the title role and Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane, MGM decided to give a son to the apeman and his mate in Tarzan Finds a Son! (1939).
0 kommentar(er)
