A few people have wanted to hear about some great, sexy bodybuilders of the female sex, and I'm more than happy to oblige as I'm a real muscle omnivore. Especially with someone like Michiko Nishiwaki, who was sort of like Grace Jones, if Grace Jones was a great martial artist and athlete, and wasn't quite so terrifying. Michiko Nishiwaki was not the stereotype of the Asian woman, demure and petite. She was a champion lifter and bodybuilder.
You know, it's a funny thing about Steve Reeves: if anyone knows him at all, it's for his role as Hercules.
Yet, the amazing thing is, Reeves had a career of fifty films and he only played Hercules twice. It's the same thing with bodybuilder, powerlifting champion and martial artist Michiko Nishiwaki. In Hong Kong, she did over 40 movies all through the 1980s and 1990s, but the one movie everybody remembers her from is the Kung Fu cop film My Lucky Stars.
Everybody remembers that one scene where she takes her robe off and it's revealed she's built like a tank. They built to that reveal incredibly well, of course. All throughout the film she was in a kimono as a subservient, stereotypical, petite Asian woman, so when she throws her duds off it's a real shock. She must have the same tailor as Groundskeeper Willie and Ned Flanders.
I just know her from that one movie, so imagine my great surprise to discover that she has a filmography nearly a mile long. She always played the same kind of character: the bodybuilder assassin femme fatale. There were entire scripts were she was menacing and quiet and didn't deliver a single line of dialogue.
One crucial but interesting difference between male bodybuilders and female bodybuilders at the movies is that male bodybuilders are usually leading men and action heroes, whereas female bodybuilders usually are stuntwomen. The list of female bodybuilders in movies is almost entirely a list of stuntwomen: Spice Williams, Faith Minton, and yes, Michiko Nishiwaki: when she came to America, she did stunt work. She was Lucy Liu's stunt double for four movies, and Kelly Hu's for one. Come to think of it, the only female bodybuilder I can think of that didn't work as a stuntwoman was Rachel McLish.
(Rachel McLish is one of those people - like Dave Draper - that I sometimes wonder why they didn't make it as a movie star.)
5 comments:
What about TV and film actress Victoria Pratt? I know she used to be featured in Musclemag as a fitness model. Does that count?
We have women like this in Hollywood and yet they choose Kristin Kreuk to play Chun Li, reputed to be the strongest woman in the world. Unbelievable.
Vicki Pratt can't really be compared to the female bodybuilders, because she emerges from a totally different role that didn't exist until the past decade and a half: the "fitness model." This, despite the fact she actually has the same exact kind of physique as Rachel McLish, and McLish was the first Ms. Olympia!
I am witholding judgment on "fitness model v. bodybuilding" the women's side of the fence, since I see the perspectives of both sides.
On the one hand, it reminds me of some of the silliness that happened to Steve Reeves in his early career: he was turned down from the role of Sampson in de Mille's "Samson and Delilah" because he was in the opinion of the producers just too big and the public couldn't handle it. On the other hand, I can see the point that women shouldn't have the same aesthetic values as men applied to them.
As for Kristen Kreuk...an actress should have at least one of two things going for them to make it in showbiz:
1) They should be a good actress;
2) They should be physically attractive;
3) They should have a lot of personality and vivaciousness.
Kristen Kreuk is neither of these three things.
Michiko is a gorgeous woman! I'll have to check out some of her films.
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