The name's Owl - Grey Owl

I play Grey Owl, an Ojibway Indian who lived in the snowy wilderness of northern Canada and had been a trapper before becoming what could be called the world's first eco-warrior.

In the Thirties he wrote books on conservation and life in the wild called Men Of The Last Frontier and Pilgrims Of The Wild, which took the pre-war English-speaking world by storm. His publisher sent him on tours of Britain and America, dressed in feathers, with a tomahawk on his hip, and he gave lectures to packed houses on environmental and conservation issues. People queued for hours to see him - he was like The Beatles. He even went to Buckingham Palace in his pigtails and buckskins.

But after he died, aged 49, his real identity was revealed. It transpired his name was Archibald Belaney, son of a Sussex doctor, who was raised by two maiden aunts in Hastings. He'd headed off to Canada aged 17 to fulfil a dream of life as an American Indian living in the wilderness. He was "adopted" by an Ojibway chief and at the time in his life that the film covers, his love was a young Mohawk woman called Pony, played by Indian actress Annie Galipeau who played Anne Parillaud as a little girl in Map Of The Human Heart. Apparently Pony, whose real name was Anahareo, was so convinced that he was Indian that after his death in 1938 she came to England to check on his aunts in Hastings.

Richard Attenborough, the film's director, knew about him from the age of 11, when Richard and his brother David queued up for five hours to see him speak and get a book signed by Grey Owl.