MUMBAI: Yesteryear child actor, Johnny Sheffield , who played Boy in the Tarzan movie series in the late 1930s and ‘40s and later starred in the Bomba, the Jungle Boy film series has expired at the age of 79.

Sheffield died of a heart attack at his home in Chula Vista about four hours after he fell off a ladder while pruning a palm tree. "He was a jungle boy to the end," his wife said noting that her husband of 51 years wasn‘t too high in the tree when he fell.

The son of British actor Reginald Sheffield was 7 when his father saw an advertisement in a Hollywood morninger that asked, "Do you have a Tarzan Jr. in your backyard?"