Dolph Lundgre

Description

Hans "Dolph" Lundgren (born 3 November 1957) is a Swedish actor, director, screenwriter, producer, martial artist, and chemical engineer. He belongs to a generation of film actors who epitomise the action hero stereotype, alongside Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Steven Seagal, and Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Lundgren received a degree in chemistry from Washington State University, a degree in chemical engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology in the early 1980s, and a master's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Sydney in 1982. He holds the rank of 3rd dan black belt in Kyokushin karate and was European champion in 1980 and 1981. While in Sydney, he became a bodyguard for Jamaican singer Grace Jones and began a relationship with her. They moved together to New York City, where, after a short stint as a model and bouncer at the Manhattan nightclub The Limelight, Jones got him a small debut role as a KGB henchman in the James Bond film A View to a Kill.

Lundgren's breakthrough came when he starred in Rocky IV in 1985 as the imposing Russian boxer Ivan Drago. Since then, he has starred in more than 40 films, almost all of them in the action genre. He portrayed He-Man in the 1987 science fantasy film Masters of the Universe and Frank Castle in the 1989 film The Punisher. In the early 1990s, he also appeared in films such as Dark Angel (1990), Universal Soldier (1992), Joshua Tree (1993), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and Blackjack (1998). In 2004, he directed his first film, The Defender, and subsequently directed The Mechanik (2005), Missionary Man (2007), Command Performance (2009), and Icarus (2010), also starring in the latter.

After a long spell performing in direct-to-video films since 1995, Lundgren returned to Hollywood in 2010 with the role of Gunner Jensen in The Expendables, alongside Stallone and an all-action star cast. He reprised his role in The Expendables 2 (2012) and The Expendables 3 (2014). Also in 2014, he co-starred in Skin Trade, an action thriller about human trafficking. The film marks his third collaboration with Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, the previous two being Showdown in Little Tokyo (1991) and Bridge of Dragons (1999). He is due to reprise his role as Gunner Jensen in The Expendables 4 (2017).

Dolph Lundgren played the formidable Russian opponent to Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed in Rocky IV.

Did you know?
Dolph Lundgren (with an IQ of 160) studied Chemistry at Clemson
University, though he graduated from Washington State. Dolph also has a master’s degree in chemical engineering and was awarded a Fullbright Scholarship to MIT in 1983.

From an interview...
"...after the third take of taking body blows, I felt a burning in my chest, but ignored it...Later that night I couldn’t breathe very well, and they took me to the emergency room...The next thing I knew I was on a low-altitude flight from Canada to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, and there I resided in intensive care for eight days...He struck me so hard in the chest that my heart slammed against my breastbone and began to swell, so the beating became labored, and without medical attention the heart would’ve continued to swell until it stopped. Many people that have car accidents die like this when the steering wheel slams into their chest. So in a sense I was hit by ‘a streetcar named Drago’ "