Biography
This page uses content from the Richard Kiel biography page on the English version of Wikipedia and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. This list of authors can be seen in the page history. Rotten Tomatoes disclaims any and all warranties as to the accuracy or reliability of the content.
Richard Kiel (born September 13, 1939, in Detroit, Michigan) is an American actor best known for his role as Jaws in the James Bond movies The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker.
He made his acting debut in an unaired TV-pilot featuring Lee Falk's superhero The Phantom, where Kiel played an assassin called "Big Mike", doing his best to kill the Phantom.
Kiel broke into films in the early 1960s with the B-movie Eegah (1962). He also portrayed an alien on a famous episode of The Twilight Zone titled "To Serve Man" (1962), a humanoid robot in the B-movie The Human Duplicators (1965), a Frankenstein-style monster (who sings and plays guitar) on an episode of The Monkees (1966), Dr. Loveless's henchman Voltaire in several episodes of The Wild Wild West (1965-1966), a prison tough in Otto Preminger's Skidoo (1968) and The Longest Yard (1974), Reace, a tough-guy pastiche of his Jaws character in Silver Streak (1976), another humanoid robot in the Italian movie The Humanoid (1979), a "race car driver" in Cannonball Run II (1984), a "tough guy" in Pale Rider (1985), and an unlikely fan in the comedy Happy Gilmore (1996).
Kiel was the original choice to play The Incredible Hulk in the 1977 TV series, and actually participated in the filming of the TV movie pilot. During the shoot, producers decided their "Hulk" needed to be muscular rather than just towering, and Kiel was dismissed. All recognizible footage of Kiel was cut, and those scenes were reshot with Lou Ferrigno.
Kiel's distinctive height and features are a result of a hormonal condition known as acromegaly. Kiel stands at 7 ft and 1 ¾ inches (2.178 metres). He notes in his 2002 autobiography, Making It Big in the Movies (ISBN 1-903111-31-5), that he used to state that he was 7 ft and 2 inches (2.1844 metres) because it was easier to remember.
In 1992, Kiel suffered a severe head wound in a car accident which has affected his auto-balance mechanism. He was, from then on, forced to walk with a cane to support his balance, and then eventually to using a motor scooter or wheelchair.
External links
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify the biographical information on this page under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.
IGN RSS Feeds