Iron Eyes Cody

Iron Eyes Cody
Cody (left) in 1947, in Glendale, California.
Born	Espera Oscar de Corti (1904-04-03)April 3, 1904 Kaplan, Louisiana, United States
Died	January 4, 1999(1999-01-04) (aged 94) Los Angeles, California, United States
Resting place	Hollywood Forever Cemetery
Other names	The Crying Indian
Years active	1927–1987
Spouse(s)	Bertha "Birdie" Parker (m. 1936–1978; her death) Wendy Foote (m. 1992–1993)

Iron Eyes Cody (born Espera Oscar de Corti April 3, 1904 – January 4, 1999) was a Sicilian-American actor. He portrayed Native Americans in Hollywood films. He also played a Native American shedding a tear about litter in one of the country's most well-known television PSAs, "Keep America Beautiful". In 1996, Cody's half-sister said that he was actually of Italian ancestry, but he denied it.

Cody was born Espera Oscar de Corti on April 3, 1904, in Kaplan in Vermilion Parish, in southwestern Louisiana, a second son of Antonio de Corti and his wife, Francesca Salpietra, immigrants from Sicily. He had two brothers, Joseph and Frank, and a sister, Victoria. His parents had a local grocery store in Gueydan, Louisiana, where he grew up. His father left the family and moved to Texas, where he took the name Tony Corti. His mother married Alton Abshire and had five more children with him.

When the three de Corti brothers were teenagers, they joined their father in Texas and shortened their last name to Corti. They moved on to California, where they were acting in movies, and changed their surname to Cody. Joseph William and Frank Henry Cody worked as extras, then moved on to other work. Frank was killed by a hit-and-run driver in 1949. The boys' father, Tony Corti, died in Texas in 1924.

Cody began acting in the early 1930s. He worked in film and television until his death. Cody claimed his father was Cherokee (and his mother Cree), also naming several different tribes, and frequently changing his claimed place of birth. To those unfamiliar with Indigenous American or First Nations cultures and people, he apparently gave the appearance of living "as if" he were Native American, fulfilling the stereotypical expectations by wearing his film wardrobe as daily clothing—including braided wig, fringed leathers and beaded moccasins— at least when photographers were visiting, and in other ways continuing to play the same Hollywood-scripted roles off-screen as well as on.