LOS ANGELES — Johnny Sheffield, who played Boy in the “Tarzan” movie series starring Johnny Weissmuller in the late 1930s and ’40s and later starred in the “Bomba, the Jungle Boy” film series, died Friday at his home near San Diego. He was 79.
Sheffield died of a heart attack about four hours after he fell off a ladder while pruning a palm tree, said his wife, Patty.
“He was a jungle boy to the end,” she said, noting that her husband of 51 years wasn’t too high in the tree when he fell, but “sometimes, he was way up there.”
The son of British actor Reginald Sheffield, Johnny Sheffield was 7 when his father saw an ad in the Hollywood Reporter asking, “Do you have a Tarzan Jr. in your backyard?”
The curly-haired Sheffield beat out more than 300 others for the role of Boy in the 1939 film “Tarzan Finds a Son,” in which Tarzan and Jane wind up adopting a young child whose parents died in a jungle plane crash.
Sheffield played the loincloth-clad Boy in eight Tarzan films, including “Tarzan’s Secret Treasure” and “Tarzan and the Amazons.”
