In 1955, Wood somehow managed to wrangle Johnson, who should have known better, into a no-budget picture called Bride of the Monster, which featured a drug-addled Bela Lugosi, lots of stolen stock footage, a foam rubber octopus and not much else. There is one word that neatly sums up the last decade of Tor Johnson’s film career: “Lobo.” Spanish for “wolf”? Yes, but in the hands of Ed Wood, it is so much less. You came here because of Plan Nine from Outer Space, and you’re all sick, depraved people for that. You came here to see how his career ground into grimy dust under Ed Wood’s sensible high heels. You came here for the dirt, the shame, the humiliation, the cheap sets and stitled dialogue. He was in at least 43 films, many more of them actual, respected projects like those in the preceding paragraph but, let’s be honest, you didn’t come here for that. Tor johnson son karl movie#I could just spend the rest of the article listing Tor Johnson’s movie pedigree. He showed up in the Thin Man series, Jack Benny’s The Meanest Man in the World, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s road movie Road to Rio, the original movie version of Carousel, Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion, and Bob Hope’s big budget project The Lemon Drop Kid (along with fellow Know Your B-Movies Actors alum Sid Melton). Field’s Man on the Flying Trapeze as the circus wrestler Tosoff, in the original Mighty Joe Young as a wrestler hired to grapple the eponymous ape, in Frank Capra’s State of the Union as–you guessed it–“Wrestler.”įor two decades, he hovered around the fringe of Hollywood, always ready when the studios needed a mute, hulking mass to intimidate someone, and he had the chance to rub elbows with a lot of movers and shakers. It was just as true then as it was today: anything popular, however fleetingly, will be put into a movie by a cynical producer. Tor’s terrifying bulk and grim, bald visage made him a popular attraction in the wrestling circuit, which itself was rapidly becoming popular in America. By the time the Depression hit, he was in the United States, barnstorming across the country, winning match after match as the “Super Swedish Angel.” He was internationally recognized as one of the greatest wrestlers in the world, and his success should be no surprise, considering that the only living man who had the strength to pick up Tor Johnson and throw him was Tor Johnson. Tor johnson son karl professional#He shaved off his thick mane of Viking hair to became a professional wrestler and quickly worked his way up the ranks. Lacking much in the way of education, he turned his great strength into his… uh… greatest strength. Growing up in Kalmar, a small industrial town on the Baltic Sea, his job prospects were mostly limited to “forklift driver” (or maybe just “forklift”). The genetics of a hundred Vikings swam down his line of ancestry and pooled into a pile of flesh big enough to exert its own gravitational pull. Standing 6'3" tall and topping out at over 400 pounds at his heaviest, he was an implacable mountain of manhood with the kind of casual, lumbering strength usually reserved for giants in fairy tales. Karl Oscar Tore Johansson was born in Kalmar, Sweden in 1903. Well, to put it more precisely, Tor Johnson had bulk. It’s an awe-inspiring, almost mystical trait that few humans possess, something that can’t be learned in any film school. Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, John Wayne all of these greats had something about them that rendered the audience incapable of taking their eyes off of them, even when said actors were very clearly sleepwalking through their scenes to collect a paycheck. No, to make a splash in Hollywood, an actor needs something more, something almost indefinable, a kind of magnetism, a certain je ne se quois that sets him or her apart from the rest of the people standing around on the set while the Director of Photography yet again argues with the Director on the framing of yet another talky two-shot.Įvery successful actor in movie history had this. And, sometimes, not even that (yes, Shia Labeouf, I’m talking directly to you). A successful movie actor has to be more than merely a competent performer.
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