Steve Reeves

The last two decades of his life were spent in Valley Center (Escondido), California. In late 2004 Shawn published the one-issue-only progressive political magazine Final Edition (http://www.sevenstories.com/Book/index.cfm?GCOI=58322100960730) which features interviews with and articles by Jonathan Schell, Noam Chomsky, Mark Strand, and Deborah Eisenberg. Later in his life, Reeves promoted drug-free bodybuilding and bred horses. He is the son of William Shawn, longtime editor of The New Yorker, and journalist Cecille Lyon Shawn. In that year he appeared as himself in the made-for-television A&E Biography: Arnold Schwarzenegger - Flex Appeal. Before becoming a writer and actor, Shawn studied history, economics, and philosophy at Harvard and Oxford, where he originally thought he might become a diplomat. His last on-screen appearance was in 2000. Shawn's political work has invited controversy, as he often presents the audience with several contradictory points of view: in Aunt Dan and Lemon, which Shawn described as a cautionary tale against fascism, the character Lemon explained her neo-Nazi beliefs with such conviction that some critics called the play effectively pro-fascist.

He went on to appear, starting in the 1950s, in a string of Samson and Hercules-type (also known as sword and sandal) movies. Among the best-known of these are Aunt Dan and Lemon (1985) and The Designated Mourner (1997), in both of which he appeared off-Broadway; the latter was made into a film by director David Hare. Reeves first film was the 1949 Kimbar of the Jungle, made for television. His later plays became more overtly political, drawing parallels between the psychology of his characters and the behavior of governments and social classes. De Mille, who considered him for the part of Samson. His early work, such as Marie and Bruce (1978), portrayed emotional and sexual conflicts in an absurdist style. After WWII military service, Reeves came to the attention film director Cecil B. Shawn's career spans all aspects of "low" and "high" culture, and his plays, unlike some of his television appearances, are considered very serious (even if they often have comic aspects).

Survivors from the Muscle Beach era recall how crowds used to follow Reeves when he walked along the beach, and how people who knew nothing about him would simply stop and stare, awestruck.. He is also an accomplished voice actor, appearing especially in animation (including Toy Story and Toy Story 2 where he played "Rex the Green Dinosaur") and commercials. He was handsome, personable, and had a magnificent physique. He has had recurring roles as the Ferengi Grand Nagus Zek on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a comic ex-reporter on Murphy Brown, the Cosbys' neighbor on The Bill Cosby Show and on many other shows. Reeves was the right man in the right place at the right time. Shawn is a widely-used character actor on television, where he has appeared in many genres and series. No champion was known to the general public--that is, until Steve Reeves came along. Other notable appearances include his role as the Masked Avenger in Allen's Radio Days (1987) ("Beware, evildoers! Wherever you are!"), as the evil Vizzini in The Princess Bride (1987), and as Uncle Vanya in Andre Gregory's idiosyncratic Chekhov production filmed by Louis Malle, Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), a reading of the play set in a crumbling theater.

However, bodybuilding still remained an obscure sport. Interviewed by film critic Roger Ebert, Shawn and Gregory denied that they were playing themselves and stated that if they remade the film, they'd swap the two characters to prove their point. .. The two actors also wrote the script, which contrasted Shawn's modest down-to-earth humanism against Gregory's extravagant New-Age fantasies, leaving the viewer of the film in an ironic suspension between the two viewpoints. By [the 1940s] the distinction between lifting weights purely for strength and training with weights to shape and proportion the body had been clearly made. His most famous role was as one of the two characters in the film My Dinner with Andre, opposite Andre Gregory. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Encylopedia of Modern Bodybuilding states:. He made his film debut playing Diane Keaton's ex-husband in Woody Allen's Manhattan in 1979, in which Woody's character, a short, balding, bespectacled ectomorph, dismisses the short, balding, bespectacled Shawn as "a homunculus.".