Don Francks

Don Francks (February 28, 1932 – April 3, 2016), also known by the stage name Iron Buffalo, was a Canadian actor, musician, and singer born in Vancouver, British Columbia. Adopted shortly after birth, he grew up in a household where his mother worked at a music store and his father was an electrician. As a child he performed on Vancouver radio doing imitations of singers, and he left high school at age 15 to take on various jobs before beginning a professional career in entertainment.

Francks launched his acting career in Canadian television, appearing as a regular on the CBC series Burns Chuckwagon from the Stampede Corral and Riding High, both in 1955, followed by the drama The Fast Ones in 1959. He starred in the CBC-TV series R.C.M.P. from 1959 to 1960, playing Constable Bill Mitchell. Additional early television work included the US-produced series The Adventures of Tugboat Annie in 1957, filmed in Toronto, and Cannonball in 1958 and Long Shot in 1959. During the 1960s he appeared in several American television productions, among them Mission: Impossible, Jericho, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Wild Wild West, and Mannix.

His Broadway career spanned 1965 to 1968 and included two productions. On February 16, 1965, Francks took the title role in the musical Kelly, playing a daredevil who plans to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. The production had tried out in Philadelphia and Boston before playing five previews in New York, and it became the first Broadway show in a generation to close on opening night. He also appeared on Broadway in The Flip Side. In addition to his Broadway work, Francks participated in a 1965 Off-Broadway production of Leonard Bernstein's Theatre Songs.

In film, Francks is perhaps best remembered for his 1968 role as Woody in the screen adaptation of Finian's Rainbow, in which he co-starred alongside Fred Astaire and Petula Clark. Other film credits include The Big Town, My Bloody Valentine, and Johnny Mnemonic. On television, he played Walter in the series La Femme Nikita from 1997 to 2001 and appeared as Lizard in the 2015 History Channel series Gangland Undercover. He also narrated the long-running CBC documentary series This Land from 1970 to 1986, which covered Canadian nature, wildlife, natural resources, and life in remote communities, and he portrayed the writer Grey Owl in the episode Land of Shadows, first aired on August 2, 1983.

Francks was an active voice actor throughout his career. He voiced Boba Fett in an episode of Star Wars: Droids, and his involvement in the Star Wars Holiday Special as the voice of the same character has been cited by some sources, though others attribute that performance to Gabriel Dell. He voiced Mok Swagger in the 1983 Canadian animated film Rock and Rule, Sabretooth in X-Men, and several characters in Inspector Gadget, a series on which his daughter Cree Summer voiced Penny during the first season. Additional voice credits include Archie Goodwin in a 1982 Canadian radio series featuring Mavor Moore as Nero Wolfe, characters in the 1988 Police Academy animated series, and Skunk in Gene Simmons's animated series My Dad the Rock Star.

As a musician, Francks composed songs and played trombone, drums, and flute. He performed in jazz venues including George's Spaghetti House in Toronto and the Village Vanguard in New York City. In August 1962, his avant-garde jazz group Three debuted unrehearsed at Toronto's Purple Onion coffeehouse, with Lenny Breau on guitar and Eon Henstridge on double bass, joined that evening by tap dancer Joey Hollingsworth. That performance was recorded live and eventually released in 2004 as At the Purple Onion on the Art of Life label. The group performed regularly in Toronto and New York and appeared in the National Film Board documentary Toronto Jazz. Francks recorded a solo album, Jackie Gleason Says No One in This World Is Like Don Francks, for Kapp Records in 1963, the title drawn from a remark Gleason made after Francks's trio performed Bye Bye Blackbird on The Jackie Gleason Show on April 23, 1963. A second album, Lost... and Alone, with orchestral arrangements by Patrick Williams, followed on Kapp in 1965. He and Breau briefly revived Three in early 1968 with bassist Dave Young replacing Henstridge, who had died the previous year. Francks appeared in the 1999 documentary The Genius of Lenny Breau and recorded his final album, 21st Century Francks, in 2002 at the Top o' the Senator in Toronto, with the recording released in 2014.

Francks received ACTRA Awards for Best Dramatic Performance in 1980 for Drying Up the Streets and in 1981 for The Phoenix Team. His children include actors Cree Summer and Rainbow Sun Francks. He supported Greenpeace and the Tibetan independence movement and maintained a collection of twelve antique cars, mostly Model-T Ford racing cars dating from 1912 to 1927. Francks died of lung cancer in Toronto on April 3, 2016.