Lundgren’s tough act

last updated 8 January 2015

Dolph Lundgren wasn’t always so imposing, said Marlow Stern in TheDailyBeast.com. The 6-foot-5-inch actor—who played Soviet boxer Ivan Drago in Rocky IV—grew up as a skinny kid in a suburb of Stockholm. His father beat him regularly. “He was violent toward my mom and me,” says the action movie star. “So I got into martial arts to work out my anger.” Lundgren won the European Championships in karate in 1980 and 1981; the following year he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to MIT, but he lost interest in school when he was hired as a bodyguard by singer Grace Jones. He became her lover, and she got him into “acting, modeling, and all that crap.” But after Rocky IV, his movie career bombed. Not that Lundgren cared. “I never put 100 percent into it. I wanted my kids to grow up away from Hollywood, so I lived in Marbella, Spain, for 10 years.” Still, his reputation as a Hollywood bad guy had its benefits. In 2009, while Lundgren was off shooting a film, a group of masked men burst into his home and took his family hostage. Lundgren says that when his oldest daughter screamed, “‘If my dad was here, this would be different,’” the men looked at a family photograph and quickly fled. “I wanted to get these guys and kill them slowly, but I couldn’t find them.”