Biography for
Gordon Mitchell (I) Plus avec IMDbPro »

Date de naissance

29 July 1923, Denver, Colorado, USA

Date de mort

20 September 2003, Marina Del Rey, California, USA (natural causes)

Nom de naissance

Charles Allen Pendleton

Taille

1,91 m

Mini Biographie

Gordon Mitchell was one of those perfectly developed bodybuilders who jumped on the Steve Reeves bandwagon and hightailed it to Italy to seek movie stardom as a Herculean strongman. Born in Denver, Colorado, but raised in Inglewood, California, Mitchell served in WWII and at one point became a prisoner of war. After the war he went to college and became a high school teacher, albeit an imposing one, what with his incredible physique. He eventually became part of the "Muscle Beach" crowd and flexed his way into the entertainment field as part of Mae West's musclebound revues, where he toured everywhere from Las Vegas to the Latin Quarter with other "abs"normal actor wannabes such as Mickey Hargitay, Brad Harris and Reg Lewis. Mitchell took a fancy to show biz and appeared as posing beefcake in such films as The Ten Commandments (1956) and Li'l Abner (1959), which, of course, did little to advance his acting career. In 1961, after Reeves' Le fatiche di Ercole (1958) (US title: "Hercules") proved a phenomenal hit and revived the "muscleman" genre, the non-Italian-speaking Mitchell headed off to Europe and began appearing in the same type of badly dubbed sandal-and-spear epics. Adept at displaying both heroics and villainy, he developed his own core of fans, but when the fad wore off around 1965, Mitchell--unlike many of his colleagues in that field who just dropped out of sight--stayed on and appeared in over 100 more films, many of them in the "spaghetti western" genre, staying true to the country that made him a star.

IMDb Mini Biographie par: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

Anecdotes

Served in the U.S. army in the Korean War.

Early in his career he toured as one of a group of "strongman" performers--one of whom was Mickey Hargitay--in Mae West's nightclub act.

He built amost single-handedly a small western-like village in the Roman countryside, that was used as the set for several Italian B-westerns.

Following his success in Italy, he helped his muscular friend Dan Vadis get into the Italian movie business.

His funeral memorial service was attended by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lou Ferrigno, Roland Kickinger, Franco Columbu, Mickey Hargitay, Richard Harrison, Sebastian Harrison, Joe Gold, Scott Brown, Michael A. Martinez, and Robert Amstler in front of the World Gym corporate headquarters.

Honored by the UCLA Film Archive at a July 6, 2003, festival showing of Il gigante di Metropolis (1961) in a theater on the Los Angeles campus.

Où sont-ils maintenant

(April 2002) Owner of World Gym International in Marina Del Rey, California

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