Name | Woody Strode |
---|---|
Birth name | Woodrow Wilson Woolwine Strode |
Birth date | July 25, 1914 |
Birth place | Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
Death date | December 31, 1994 |
Death place | Glendora, California, U.S. |
Occupation | Sportsman Actor |
Yearsactive | 1941–1994 |
Spouse | Princess Luukialuana "Luana" Kalaeloa (1941 - 1980; her death) Tina Strode (1982 - 1994; his death) |
Strode, Kenny Washington and Jackie Robinson starred on the 1939 UCLA Bruins football team, in which they made up three of the four backfield players. Along with Ray Bartlett, there were four African-Americans playing for the Bruins, when only a few dozen at all played on other college football teams. They played eventual conference and national champion USC to a 0–0 tie with the 1940 Rose Bowl on the line. It was the first UCLA–USC rivalry football game with national implications.
Strode and fellow UCLA alumnus Kenny Washington were two of the first African-Americans to play in major college programs and later the modern National Football League, playing for the Los Angeles Rams in 1946. No blacks had played in the NFL from 1933 to 1946. UCLA teammate Jackie Robinson would go on to break the color barrier in Major League baseball (in fact, all three had played in the semi-professional Pacific Coast Professional Football League earlier in the decade). In 1947,1948 and 1949, he played for the Calgary Stampeders of the Western Interprovincial Football Union in Canada, retiring due to injury in 1949.
In 1941 had dabbled for several months in professional wrestling. Following the end of his football career in 1949, he returned to wrestling part-time between acting jobs until 1958, wrestling the likes of Gorgeous George.
Strode made his screen debut in 1941 in Sundown, but became more active in the 1950s, eventually in roles of increasing depth. He played an African warrior in The Lion Hunters in Monogram's Bomba the Jungle Boy series in 1951. He played dual roles (billed as "Woodrow Strode") in The Ten Commandments (1956) as an Ethiopian king as well as a slave, and in 1959 portrayed the cowardly Private Franklin in Pork Chop Hill. He appeared once on Johnny Weismuller's 1955-1956 syndicated television series Jungle Jim.
He became a close friend of director John Ford, who gave him the title role in Sergeant Rutledge (1960) as a member of the Ninth Cavalry falsely accused of rape and murder; he appeared in smaller roles in Ford's later films Two Rode Together (1961), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Seven Women (1966). Strode was very close to the director. During Ford's declining years, Strode once spent four months sleeping on the director's floor as his caretaker, and he was later present at Ford's death.
Strode played memorable villains opposite three screen Tarzans. In 1958, he appeared as Ramo opposite Gordon Scott in Tarzan's Fight for Life. In 1963, he was cast opposite Jock Mahoney's Tarzan as both the dying leader of an unnamed Asian country and that leader's unsavory brother, Khan, in Tarzan's Three Challenges. In the late 1960s, he appeared in several episodes of the Ron Ely Tarzan television series.
Strode played a heroic sailor on a sinking ship in the 1960 film The Last Voyage. In 1966, he landed a major starring role in The Professionals, a major box-office success which established him as a recognizable star. Another notable part was as a gunslinger in the opening sequence of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1968); after this, he appeared in several other spaghetti Westerns of lesser quality. His starring role as a thinly disguised Patrice Lumumba in Seduto alla sua destra (released in the U.S. as Black Jesus) garnered Strode a great deal of press at the time, but the film is largely forgotten now. He remained a visible character actor throughout the '70s and '80s, and has become widely regarded (along with Sidney Poitier and Brock Peters) as one of the most important black film actors of his time. His last film was The Quick and the Dead (1995).
Category:American film actors Category:Spaghetti Western actors Category:Western (genre) film actors Category:American football tight ends Category:Calgary Stampeders players Category:Los Angeles Rams players Category:UCLA Bruins football players Category:University of California, Los Angeles alumni Category:People from Los Angeles, California Category:Cancer deaths in California Category:Deaths from lung cancer Category:Burials at Riverside National Cemetery Category:1914 births Category:1994 deaths Category:American people of Cherokee descent Category:United States Army personnel Category:American decathletes Category:African American players of Canadian football Category:African-American people Category:African American actors Category:American military personnel of World War II Category:African-American military personnel Category:American professional wrestlers Category:African American track and field athletes
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