Woody Strode

Actor and football player

• Born: July 28, 1914
• Birthplace: Los Angeles, California
• Died: December 31, 1994
• Place of death: Glendora, California

Strode was a pioneer in two fields: He was one of the first American Americans in the National Football League and an actor whose work in films and television spanned a half-century. Although he had few leading roles, Strode had a long career as a character actor, working with several major directors and stars.

Early Life

Woodrow Wilson Woolwine Strode was born July 28, 1914, to parents who had moved from New Orleans to Los Angeles four years before his birth. His father, a brick mason, was the son of Blackfoot and Creek Native Americans, and his mother was the African American daughter of a former slave. Strode’s mixed background later allowed him to play a variety of ethnic types.

Although he was selected to the Los Angeles All-City football team, his high school grades prevented Strode from being offered a college scholarship. After three years of self-study, he was admitted to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where he performed on the football and track teams. While Strode was on a goodwill tour, German film director Leni Riefenstahl spotted the muscular six-foot-four, 210-pound athlete. As a result, he became the model for an Adolf Hitler-commissioned poster, designed by Willy Petzold, for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Strode was a star end at UCLA on a football team featuring running backs Jackie Robinson, the future baseball great, and Kenny Washington. Barred from careers in the National Football League (NFL), Strode and Washington played for the semiprofessional Hollywood Bears from 1941 to 1945. Strode also became a professional wrestler. When the Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles in 1946, the commissioners of the Los Angeles Coliseum demanded an integrated team, and Strode and Washington became the NFL’s first African American players. Strode played only one season, catching four passes. He then played for the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League until 1949.

After a two-year courtship, Strode married Hawaiian princess Luuialuanna Kalaelola, known as Luana, in 1940. Their marriage, which produced two children, angered many whites in Los Angeles. Luana died in 1980, and Strode married his second wife, Tina, in 1982.

Life’s Work

Strode appeared as an extra in a few films from 1939 to 1943. He began working in films and television full time in 1951, usually playing African, Asian, or Native American characters, often without screen credit, in low-budget productions or television series such as Ramar of the Jungle and Jungle Jim. His first significant roles include playing the lion in a film of George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion (1952), a Jamaican sailor in Budd Boetticher’s City Beneath the Sea (1953), and the king of Ethiopia in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956).

Strode had a larger role as an Army private in the Korean War drama Pork Chop Hill (1959). Then came his most famous role, as the title character in John Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge (1960), a Western in which the soldier played by Strode is charged with rape and murder. The film was the first to acknowledge the part played by African Americans in settling the West. Strode, who became close friends with the director, also appeared in Ford’s Two Rode Together (1961), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Seven Women (1966). Another of his well-known roles came during this period, when he played a gladiator who befriends Kirk Douglas’s title character in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960).

Strode’s other major film roles include the Western The Professionals (1966); Seduto alla sua destra (1968; Black Jesus), in which he stars as a Congo rebel leader imprisoned with two white men; Sergio Leone’s C’era una volt ail West (1968; Once Upon a Time in the West); Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club (1984); and Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead (1995), his last film. Strode made many films, mostly Westerns and adventure films, in Italy as well as elsewhere in Europe. Ironically, the former athlete never appeared in a sports film. He died in December, 1994, of lung cancer.

Significance

Strode was stereotyped throughout most of his acting career as much for his physicality as for his mixed race. Strode was one of a handful of African American performers who began their careers during Hollywood’s less enlightened days and lasted through the so-called New Hollywood era and beyond. Although some have criticized Strode for not taking a more active part in the struggle for civil rights, he chose to let his presence on the screen speak for itself. In lending support to actors from John Wayne, Gregory Peck, and Lee Marvin to Richard Gere, Sharon Stone, and Leonardo DiCaprio, Strode became one of the entertainment industry’s leading and most enduring African American character actors.

Bibliography

Burrell, Walter Rico. “Whatever Happened to Woody Strode?” Ebony 37, no. 8 (June, 1982): 140-141, 144. Written as Strode neared his sixty-eighth birthday, this profile offers an overview of his career and details of his private life, including his workout regimen and hobbies. Illustrated.

Manchel, Frank. “The Man Who Made the Stars Shine Brighter: An Interview with Woody Strode.” Black Scholar 25, no. 2 (Spring, 1995): 37-46. Reprint of an interview conducted in 1972 that covers Strode’s major films, especially his work with John Ford. Preceded by a brief biography.

Strode, Woody, and Sam Young. Goal Dust. Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1990. Autobiography emphasizes Strode’s youth in Los Angeles and his football career more than his acting.