An article I wrote for Hans India - a reputed daily in Telangana.
Call him a body-builder or an action hero or a governor, you couldn’t go wrong because he has donned each of these roles with panache. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a truly multifaceted individual, scripted his career in an inexplicable manner without resting on his laurels. Known as the ‘Austrian Oak’ for his well-sculpted body, he conquered every major title in the world of body building. Of course, had he stuck to bodybuilding alone, his fame would have gradually faded into oblivion! Conversely, his decision to enter Hollywood had thrown open doors to a sky-soaring career.
However, if you thought his climb uphill was easy peasy, you are dead wrong. For those who aren’t aware, here are a few interesting titbits. Initially, directors were reluctant about casting Arnold as a hero. They claimed that Arnold possessed an over-built body, an incomprehensible accent and an unpronounceable name. So much so, that in one of his earlier roles in ‘Hercules in New York’, released in 1969, his entire voice was dubbed. His screen name was deliberately changed to ‘Arnold strong’. When the movie flopped, he was not offered roles for a long time. Sounds unbelievable?! Well, that’s the hard hitting truth.
But what genuinely turned the tables in Arnold’s favour was his 1982 flick ‘Conan and the Barbarian’, where he donned the role of a protagonist. The movie proved to be one of the biggest box office grossers. The colossal success instantly shot him into the élite galaxy of super stars.
Having tasted his initial success, Arnold donned various roles with élan, delivering blockbuster after blockbuster. Terminator, the sci-fi movie, released in 1984, not only made cash registers ring but took youngsters by storm with its technological genius and riveting storyline.
Commando, released in 1985, was no less in terms of action. A run-of-the-mill storyline but truckloads of action saw the movie escalate to great heights of commercial success. Audience never had trouble imagining this beefcake beat up four guys at a time or spray bullets with an oversized machine gun. In fact, this very string of Arnold’s successes, had the directors, who once claimed he didn’t possess requisite hero material, queuing up at the doorstep.
What perhaps firmly established Arnold’s position as one of the bankable Hollywood super stars was ‘Predator’? In the movie, Arnold is pitted against an alien with super human strength equipped with technologically superior weaponry. As the alien strategically picks up and eliminates his fellow army personnel one by one, the onus of defending himself against this indomitable extra-terrestrial being is what keeps the Arnold fan at the edge of the seat. A slightly weird storyline but gripping action ensures excitement proportion is on a different plateau altogether.
Arnold’s assorted movies appealed to everyone. Be it the ‘Twins’, where his twin brother overshadows his personality and often puts him in a tight spot, or the ‘Red Heat’ where Arnold, a soviet secret agent, teams up with an American agent to catch criminals, or ‘True Lies’, where he is a secret agent, but keeps his profession hidden from his wife, until a few uptight situations unravel his identity…each of these hits never failed to regale the audiences.
Besides, there are numerous other successes ‘Total Recall’, ‘Kindergarten Cop’, ‘Jingle all the Way’, ‘Raw Deal’, ‘Junior’, ‘Collateral Damage’, ‘The Running Man’, ‘Batman and Robin’…which played to packed houses. These are apart from sequels of ‘Conan The Barbarian’ and the ‘Terminator’, which in themselves are runaway successes.
In hindsight, who would have thought that a former bodybuilding champion could fill the shoes of a thorough-breed actor so inconspicuously well? Not merely acting in few movies for a brief period, but for numerous movies for four decades! No trivial chore, right!
What perhaps endears Arnold to his fans is his shrewd selection of scripts and putting his everything into the role. Arnold may not be prodigious in the genre of drama, but he is unquestionably a choice pick for action movies. In fact, he carved his own forte in the filmy domain with some of his sharp one-liners, which spiced up the high moment a wee bit more!
His trade mark one-liners, spot-on situational, such as ‘I’ll be back’ from the movie Terminator or ‘You have been erased’ from Eraser or ‘If it bleeds we can kill it’ from Predator ‘what killed the dinosaurs? The ice age.’ from Batman and Robin, ‘Consider that a divorce’ from Total Recall …. Never fail to sit pretty in ones’ minds and add charm to his acting persona.
No wonder his superb acting and punchy dialogues won him scores of awards, including:, Golden Globe award, MTV movie award, Prime Time Emmy Award, Razzie Award and others. The awards vociferously speak of his influential and aesthetically appealing works.
The multifaceted individual, who is fondly called as ‘Governator’ (a term coined using governor and terminator), truly knows how to impress on his audiences. Of course, with the new breed of actors taking over the mantle of delivering bigger hits, the competition, one can say, is quite severe for the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis and other troupers.
So, here’s hoping that Arnold’s 2015 releases ‘Maggie’ and ‘Terminator: Genisys’, set to release in May and June respectively, will rock the fans and audiences the world over. He truly deserves appreciation for all his unassailable achievements.
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