He was a pro wrestler-turned-Hollywood actor decades before Hulk Hogan and Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson. He was also an Ivy League graduate and Olympic medalist who spoke four languages. His imposing physique made him perfect for gangster and tough guy roles. However, he became well-known for playing lawmen, ambulance drivers, drill sergeants, and other authority figures. In a film career that lasted almost 25 years, Nat Pendleton was a lumbering mass of contradictions who delighted audiences with his expertise in tackling a wide array of supporting roles.
Born Nathaniel Greene Pendleton on an Iowa farm in 1895, his family would eventually abandon country life and move to Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from Brooklyn’s acclaimed Poly Prep High, Pendleton enrolled at Columbia University. He was an undefeated collegiate wrestler before earning a degree in economics. Nat would compete in the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium and bring home a silver medal for his mat prowess. Back in the States, he joined the world of pro wrestling. A 1923 leg injury during a match with “Nebraska Tiger Man” John Pesek, though, soon had him seeking a new career (Nat would still wrestle off and on for the next few years).
Pendleton made his film debut in the 1924 silent drama The Hoosier Schoolmaster, and later that year had an uncredited turn as a barber in Monsieur Beaucaire alongside Rudolph Valentino. Through the late ’20s and early ’30s Nat was seen on the Broadway stage (most notably in 1929’s My Girl Friday) and in various movies as henchmen, bodyguards, and athletes. He was an assistant football coach in 1931’s Spirit of Notre Dame and played opposite James Cagney in ’31’s Blonde Crazy and Taxi! the following year.
Nat called on his ring experiences when he wrote the story for the 1932 sports drama Deception, in which he co-starred as a pro wrestler out for revenge against a crooked promoter (Leo Carrillo) who fixed his bouts. Also that year, he played another grappler in the John Ford mat drama Flesh; was a college football star who gets “kidnapped” by Harpo and Chico in the Marx Brothers romp Horse Feathers; and was an Ancient Roman criminal in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross. One 1932 role he didn’t get was the lead in Tarzan the Ape Man; Nat auditioned for the Jungle King but lost out to fellow Olympian Johnny Weissmuller.
Nat was an eloquent hoodlum named Shakespeare in Frank Capra and Damon Runyon’s 1933 comedy Lady for a Day and a baseball catcher who falls victim to a killer in 1934’s Death on the Diamond. That same year found Pendleton on the right side of the law as Police Detective Guild–whose crime-solving skills pale next to Nick Charles’ (William Powell)–in The Thin Man; he would reprise the role in the third series entry, 1939’s Another Thin Man. Nat also worked with Powell, and Jean Harlow, in the 1935 musical/romance Reckless, and again in 1936’s Oscar-winning The Great Ziegfeld, with Powell in the title role and Pendleton showing off his build as real-life 1890s strongman Eugen Sandow.
It was back to the squared circle when Nat played lunkheaded Greek-American wrestler Joe Skopapolous, star client of promoter Ed Hatch (Humphrey Bogart), in Swing Your Lady, a 1938 “comedy” considered one of Bogie’s worst pictures. Later that year Nat got what would turn out to be a nine-film recurring role when he played ambulance driver Joe Wayman in M-G-M’s Young Dr. Kildare; he would return as Joe in five more Kildare features and three “Dr. Gillespie” spin-offs starring the ever-irascible Lionel Barrymore. Pendleton, as another hospital worker, also appeared with Barrymore in the 1939 fantasy On Borrowed Time and reunited with the brothers Marx as a thieving big top strongman in ’39’s At the Circus.
Pendleton was bedeviled by another notable comedy team–Abbott and Costello–in the duo’s first starring film, 1941’s Buck Privates. As a tough drill sergeant, Nat has his hands full trying to turn Bud and Lou into soldiers. Oddly, he played essentially the same role alongside two other hapless recruits–Frank Faylen and Charlie Hall–in Monogram’s very similar ’41 spoof Top Sergeant Mulligan.
His ’40s work also included a pair of horror outings–The Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942) with Lionel Atwill and Scared to Death (1947) with Bela Lugosi–and he was top-billed as an outlaw in the ’47 western Death Valley. That same year Universal decided to bring him back with A & C in the postwar follow-up Buck Privates Come Home. This turned out to be Nat’s final film role, as he retired from Hollywood and moved with his second wife to San Diego. He would appear only once on TV, in a 1956 episode of the anthology series Schlitz Playhouse. After suffering a heart attack, Pendleton passed away in a San Diego hospital in 1967 at the age of 72.