Rodd Redwing

American trickshooter, actor and stuntman

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. 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.

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

Webb later changed his name to Roderic "Rodd" Redwing, adopted a fictitious Native American identity (a phenomenon sometimes now referred to as Pretendian), and reported his birthplace as 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. Redwing claimed that his mother was from a Chickasaw reservation in Oklahoma, and that his 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.

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 the CBS celebrity quiz show, What's My Line?. He played the role of Mr. Brother, a Cheyenne friend and informer of Marshal Wyatt Earp's, in eight episodes of the television series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp.

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.