Bruce Bennett

At 100 years old, Bruce Bennett has this physical status:

Harold Herman Brix (May 19, 1906-February 24, 2007), later known as Bruce Bennett, was an American actor and Olympic silver medalist in the shot put.

Early life and Olympics

Harold Herman Brix was born and raised in Tacoma, Washington, where he attended Stadium High School, which he graduated in 1924. He was the fourth of five children born to an immigrant couple from Germany. Herman, his father's favorite boy, died before Harold's birth and was given the middle name Herman in honor of his brother. He had forego using his own first name in favour of his middle name before high school, as this pleased his father, a lumberman who ran a number of logging camps. His first job was as an athlete. He played football (tackle) in the 1926 Rose Bowl and was a track-and-field star at the University of Washington, where he majored in economics. In the 1928 Olympic Games, two years ago, he captured the Silver medal for the shot put. He has also won four consecutive AAU shot put titles (1928–31), the NCAA championship in 1927, and the AAU indoor championships in 1930 and 1932. He set a world indoor record of 15.61 meters (51 ft. 3 in 1930). He set his personal record at 16.07 m (52 ft 9 in), but during the Olympic trials he did worse and failed to qualify for the Los Angeles Games in 1932.

Personal life

By longtime wife Jeannette, Bennett had two children, Christopher Brix and Christina Katich, who died in 2000. They named their children after their parents. They had three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Bennett, who appeared in theatre, went on to be a very successful businessman in the 1960s. He also continued to pursue his lifelong obsession with parasailing and skydiving. He last skydived at the age of 96, descending from an altitude of 10,000 feet near Lake Tahoe.

Bennett turned 100 on May 19, 2006, and died less than a year later in February 2007 from injuries as a result of a broken hip.

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Early film career as Tarzan

Brix came from Los Angeles in 1929 to compete for the Los Angeles Athletic Club and befriended actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who arranged a screen test for

MGM, adapting author Edgar Rice Burroughs' classic Tarzan adventures for the screen, selected Brix to play the title character in 1931. However, Brix died on camera shooting the 1931 football film Touchdown, so swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller took over Brix and became a main actor. Dearholt starred Brix in the lead after Ashton Dearholt begged Burroughs to form Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises, Inc., and make a Tarzan serial film. Burroughs made the decision himself, according to a pressbook copy, but Brix later revealed that Burroughs never saw him before the contract was signed, and then just briefly. The film was shot on location in Guatemala under extreme circumstances (jungle diseases and cash shortages were common). Brix did his own stunts, including a fall to rocky cliffs below. Gabe Essoe's passage from his book Tarzan of the Movies: "Brix's portrayal was the first time in between the silents and the 1960s that Tarzan was accurately depicted in films." He was manned, cultured, soft-spoken, a well-educated English lord with a wide variety of languages, and he didn't grunt."

Dearholt was forced to film large portions of the serial back in Hollywood and Brix, but his travel and daily living expenses in Guatemala were not covered during the shooting, so neither cast member nor actress knew his salary. The finished film, The New Adventures of Tarzan, was released in 1935 by Burroughs-Tarzan and was sold to theaters as a 12-chapter serial or a seven-reel feature. Tarzan and the Green Goddess, the film's second feature, was culled from the film in 1938. In Republic's serial Hawk of the Wilderness, he also portrayed the titular hero.

Name change and film career

Brix continued to work in serials and action scenes for low-budget studios until 1939. Brix changed his name to "Bruce Bennett" and became a shareholder of Columbia Pictures' stock company, finding himself typecast as Tarzan in the minds of major producers. He'll be seen in a variety of Columbia films, from expensive dramas to B mysteries and slapstick comedies, during the next few years (How High Is Up) Buster Keaton's The Spook Speaks With Buster Keaton, The Three Stooges. (e.g., etc.) When he served in the United States Navy, World War II interrupted his film career.

Bennett appeared in many films in the 1940s and early 1950s, including Sahara (1943) with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (1947), The Man I Love (1947) with Ida Prentiss (1948) with Bogart and Walter Huston (1948) with Joan Crawford and George Watson (1952) with Margaret Crawford and Joyce Shannon (1954) with James Stewart and Steven Davis (1950) with Bogart and Margaret Moore (1950) with Thomas Stewart, Sudden Fear (1948) with Michael Crawford,

"Bennett leapt into grittier roles in the late 1940s and early 1950s, playing a detective in William Castle's Undertow and a forensic scientist who assists with the investigation of a murder in John Sturges' Mystery Street," the Washington Post said. In the Outfield (1951), he played a key role (an aging baseball player) in the Angels.

In an episode of the syndicated television series Stories of the Century starring and narrated by Jim Davis, Bennett played William Quantrill, the Confederate guerrilla figure. In the 1961 episode "The Case of the Misguided Missile," Bennett made five guest appearances on Perry Mason, including as murder victim Lawrence Balfour on the 1958 episode "The Case of the Unexpected Loser" and as murderer Dan Morgan. He appeared in five episodes of Science Fiction Theatre.

Bennett appeared in B-films and on television in guest-starring roles from the mid-1950s to present. The Alligator People (1959) and the Fiend of Dope Island (1961), two films from this period (filmed 1959, released 1961). Bennett, in fact, co-wrote the last script and portrays the title character.

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