Iron Eyes’ career started in the silent era. He appeared in Cecil B. DeMille’s first independent film, The Road to Yesterday (1925). Iron Eyes appeared in Whistling Dan (1932), King of the Stallions (1942), Under the Nevada Skies (1946), and even teamed with the Bowery Boys in the 1947 farce, Bowery Buckaroos. Stereotypically typecast as an Indian, Iron Eyes mostly worked in Westerns (either as a one-liner man or a backdrop), such as Broken Arrow (1950), Son of Paleface (1952), Sitting Bull (1954), and A Man Called Horse (1970).
Iron Eyes Cody’s most memorable part came in the early 1970s, in the ever-famous commercial for the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign, in which he was seen as the Indian with a tear running down his cheek. Says long time friend and manager, Kenn E. Kingsbury, Jr., “Iron Eyes was a giving person. He loved children. He especially had a tender spot for kids with disabilities. Whenever he was asked to do charity work for them, he would always say, ‘I will be there.’ He was a good man.” Cody died in his Los Angeles home at the age of 92.