This page uses content from the Woody Strode 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.

Woodrow Wilson Woolwine Strode (born July 28, 1914, Los Angeles, California; died December 31, 1994) was a decathlete and football star at UCLA before becoming a film actor.

Strode and fellow UCLA alumnus Kenny Washington were two of the first African-Americans to play in the National Football League, playing for the Los Angeles Rams in 1946. In 1948, he moved to the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League. He also spent a few years in professional wrestling, wrestling the likes of Gorgeous George.

As an actor, he made his screen debut in 1941 in Sundown, but became more active in the 1950s in roles that required little more than his physical presence, such as dual roles in The Ten Commandments (1956) as an Ethiopian king as well as a slave. 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 would later appear in smaller roles in Ford's later films, Two Rode Together (1961) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). However, he is probably best remembered for his brief role in Spartacus (1960), in which he fights Kirk Douglas to the death. In 1966 he landed a major starring role in The Professionals, with Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, and Robert Ryan, a major box-office success which (almost) established him as a major 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 would appear in several other spaghetti Westerns of lesser quality. 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 with Leonardo DiCaprio in The Quick and the Dead (1995).

Strode died of lung cancer on December 31, 1994, in Glendora, California. He is buried at Riverside National Cemetery in Riverside, Calif.

Trivia

• Strode's first wife Luana was a Hawaiian princess.
• Strode posed for one of 2 paintings commissioned by Adolf Hitler for the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.
• He wrote an autobiography entitled Goal Dust (ISBN 0-8191-7680-X).

External link

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