Bull Montana

Lewis Montagna
Ring name(s)	Bull Montana
Billed height	5 ft 10 in (1.78 m)
Billed weight	250 lb (110 kg)
Born	May 16, 1887 Voghera, Italy
Died	January 24, 1950 Los Angeles, California
Billed from	Los Angeles, California
Trained by	Gene Dundee

Bull Montana (May 16, 1887 in Voghera, Italy - January 24, 1950 in Los Angeles, California), was a professional wrestler and American actor.

This 1921 Vanity Fair caricature by Ralph Barton shows the famous people who, he imagined, left work each day in Hollywood; use cursor to identify individual figures.

Lewis Montagna (his real name after his birth name Luigi Montagna) came to the U.S. as a child. The hulking, plug-ugly Montagna became a professional wrestler under the name of Bull Montana. He gravitated to films in 1917, appearing first in several of the vehicles of his close pal Douglas Fairbanks. In 1919 he appeared as a gruesome villain in Maurice Tourneur's masterpiece Victory alongside Lon Chaney. He was usually cast as a thug, henchman or something not quite sympathetic, and sometimes not quite human (he was the apelike cave dweller in 1925's The Lost World opposite Wallace Beery as Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger). Tempering his on-screen brutishness with humor, Montana starred in his own series of two-reel comedies in the early 1920s, spoofing everyone from Robin Hood (Rob 'Em Good) to the Corsican Brothers (The Two Twins). He continued playing movie bits into the 1940s, notably as one of Buster Crabbe's antagonists in the 1936 series Flash Gordon. Like many mashed-face musclemen of the movies, Bull Montana is reputed to have been as gentle as a lamb in real life. He is buried in Calvary Cemetery.

Selected filmography

• Palooka from Paducah (1935)
• Glorifying the American Girl (1929)
• The Show of Shows (1929)
• On the Front Page (1926)
• Stop, Look and Listen (1926)
• The Lost World (1925)
• Hollywood (1923) cameo
• Held to Answer (1923)
• The Timber Queen (1922)
• Crazy to Marry (1921)
• Hard Luck (1921)
• The Mollycoddle (1920)
• The Girl in Number 29 (1920)
• Daredevil Jack (1920)
• When the Clouds Roll by (1919)
• The Unpardonable Sin (1919)
• His Majesty, the American (1919)

External links

• Bull Montana at the Internet Movie Database