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Nat Pendleton
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nathaniel Greene Pendleton (August 9, 1895 - October 12, 1967) was an American Olympic wrestler and film actor.
Born in Davenport, Iowa, Pendleton studied at Columbia University where he began his wrestling career. He was twice Eastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association (EIWA) champion in 1914 and 1915. Chosen to compete in the US wrestling team at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium, Pendleton lost only one match during the competition, and was awarded a silver medal. Returning to the US he became a professional wrestler, and with the celebrity status he had achieved, drifted into movies in the late 1920s.
His early roles were largely uncredited, until he was chosen to appear in Horse Feathers (1932) opposite the Marx Brothers, and his career began to develop. His role as circus strongman Eugen Sandow in The Great Ziegfeld (1936) brought him the strongest reviews of his career. Pendleton was most often cast in supporting roles as thugs, gangsters, or policemen and was usually typecast playing characters that depended on their brawn but were "none too bright".
Some of his other films include Manhattan Melodrama (1934), The Thin Man (1934), The Shopworn Angel (1938), Another Thin Man (1939), At the Circus (1939) and Northwest Passage (1940). He appeared in recurring roles in two film series of the late 1930s and 1940 - as Joe Wayman, the ambulance driver in the Dr. Kildare series, and its spin-off, the Dr. Gillespie series. He made his final film appearance in 1947's Buck Privates Come Home, and died in San Diego, California in 1967 from a heart attack.