‘Boy’ in Tarzan Movies Johnny Sheffield Has Died

(HMG Celebrity News) – Curly haired Johnny Sheffield, who played the character Boy in the Tarzan movies of the 1930s and ’40s, has died at age 79.  The child actor later starred in the Bomba, the Jungle Boy series. His wife, Patty Sheffield, told the Los Angeles Times that he died Friday of a heart attack at his home in the San Diego suburb of Chula Vista. She says he fell off a ladder while pruning a palm tree four hours earlier.

Johnny Sheffield, the son of British actor Reginald Sheffield was seven years old, when he starred on Broadway in the original cast of “On Borrowed Time.”  When Maureen O’Sullivan decided to retire from the Tarzan films playing Tarzan’s mate Jane, it was decided to bring in a boy to portray Tarzan’s adopted son.  Sheffield beat out more than 300 other youngsters and was hand-picked by Weissmuller for the role of Boy in the 1939 movie ‘Tarzan Finds a Son!’ He went on to co-star with Johnny Weissmuller in seven more Tarzan films.

In 1948 Sheffield had gotten too big to play Boy any longer, and Monogram pictures hired Sheffield to play the role of “Bomba” in a series of 12 “Bomba” films from 1949 to 1955 .