In 1939, MGM placed an advertisement in the Hollywood Reporter asking a simple question: “Have you a Tarzan Junior in your backyard? ” The studio was searching for a boy to play Boy, the adopted son of Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan in its popular Tarzan film series. More than 300 children auditioned for the part. Weissmuller made the final choice, and he selected seven-year-old Johnny Sheffield, a young actor whose father had spotted the notice and arranged for his son to try out.

John Matthew Sheffield was born on April 11, 1931, in Pasadena, California, to Reginald Sheffield and Louise Van Loon. He had already entered show business at a young age, making his stage debut in 1938 in the Broadway play On Borrowed Time. The Tarzan role, however, would define his career. His first film, Tarzan Finds a Son, was released in 1939, and Sheffield immediately became a recognizable child star.

That same year, he appeared in the musical Babes in Arms alongside Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, both of whom were his classmates at the MGM studio school. He also worked with performers such as Jeanette MacDonald, Pat O’Brien, Cesar Romero, and Beverly Garland, and played the childhood version of the title character in Knute Rockne All American. Sheffield played Boy in eight Tarzan films in total, three produced at MGM and five more after the production moved to RKO Pictures. As he grew older, however, he outgrew the role of the jungle boy, and the studio could no longer present him convincingly as a small child.

Rather than see his career end, the teenage actor transitioned to a new franchise. Allied Artists cast him as the lead in a jungle adventure series of his own, centered on a character named Bomba. The first film, Bomba the Jungle Boy, was released in 1949. Sheffield would go on to play Bomba twelve times, more than any other character he portrayed.

The series remained in production until 1955, ending with Lord of the Jungle. The Bomba films found their audience in the matinee market of the 1950s, often shown on Saturday afternoons alongside other popular B-movie series. For many young viewers, Johnny Sheffield was as familiar a figure in the jungle as Weissmuller had been a generation earlier. But the era of jungle adventures on film was beginning to fade.

After the Bomba series concluded, Sheffield attempted to move into television. He shot a pilot for a proposed series called Bantu the Zebra Boy, but producers could not find a sponsor, and the show was never made. At the age of twenty-four, Sheffield walked away from acting entirely. He enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles to study for a business degree and began investing his earnings in real estate.

Over the following decades, he built a second career in farming, real estate, and construction. For a time, he worked as a representative for the Santa Monica Seafood Company. He eventually settled in Arizona, where he married Patricia in 1959 and raised three children. In his later years, Sheffield returned to the public eye in a modest way.

Living in Southern California, he wrote articles about his Hollywood childhood and sold copies of his unreleased Bantu the Zebra Boy pilot on video to collectors and fans who remembered his films. He remained connected to the legacy of the Tarzan series, even as the actors who had starred alongside him passed away. On October 15, 2010, Sheffield was pruning a palm tree at his home in Chula Vista, California, when he fell from a ladder. The injuries he sustained were not initially considered life-threatening, but four hours later, he suffered a heart attack and died.

He was seventy-nine years old. His body was cremated, and his ashes were returned to his family. Johnny Sheffield’s career spanned a brief but remarkable era in Hollywood. He began as a child actor chosen by Johnny Weissmuller himself, became a fixture in the Tarzan films, and then carried a jungle franchise of his own for more than half a decade.

His retirement at twenty-four cut his screen career short, but his films remained a staple of Saturday afternoon television for years, introducing new generations of viewers to the boy who grew up in the jungle.