Bull Montana

Bull Montana
Montana in The Punctured Prince (1922)
Birth name	Luigi Montagna
Born	May 16, 1887 Voghera, Italy
Died	Los Angeles, California
Professional wrestling career
Ring name(s)	Bull Montana
Billed height	5 ft 10 in (1.78 m)
Billed weight	250 lb (110 kg)
Billed from	Los Angeles, California
Trained by	Gene Dundee

Lewis Montagna (May 16, 1887 – January 24, 1950), born Luigi Montagna and better known as Bull Montana, was a professional wrestler and Italian-American actor.

Career

Montagna was born in Voghera, Italy and came to the U.S. as a child. He 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. Numbered among his many friends was Abe "The Newsboy" Hollandersky, boxer, wrestler, and movie extra, who claimed Montagna offered to help him finance his 1930 autobiography.

Montagna 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

• In Again, Out Again (1917)
• Wild and Woolly (1917) (uncredited)
• Down to Earth (1917)
• The Border Legion (1918)
• He Comes Up Smiling (1918)
• His Majesty, the American (1919)
• The Unpardonable Sin (1919)
• Victory (1919)
• When the Clouds Roll by (1919)
• Daredevil Jack (1920)
• Treasure Island (1920)
• The Girl in Number 29 (1920)
• The Mollycoddle (1920)
• Hard Luck (1921)
• One Wild Week (1921)
• Crazy to Marry (1921)
• The Timber Queen (1922)
• Held to Answer (1923)
• Hollywood (1923) cameo
• The Lost World (1925)
• Stop, Look and Listen (1926)
• The Skyrocket (1926)
• On the Front Page (1926)
• The Show of Shows (1929)
• Glorifying the American Girl (1929)
• Palooka from Paducah (1935)

External links

• Bull Montana at the Internet Movie Database
• Bull Montana at Virtual History