AP Features, March 1st, 2007
Herman Brix, an Olympic shot-putting medalist-turned-actor who played Tarzan in a 1930s movie, has died. He was 100.
Brix, who used the name Bruce Bennett for many of his movies, died of complications from a broken hip on Saturday at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center, his son Christopher told The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday.
Although fellow Olympian Johnny Weismuller was better known for playing the lead in MGM's 1930s Tarzan movies, "Tarzan" author Edgar Rice Burroughs picked Brix to star in the 1935 independently-produced movie "The New Adventures of Tarzan."
Brix won the Olympic silver medal for the shot put in 1928. After moving to Los Angeles the next year, he became friends with actor Douglas Fairbanks, who arranged a screen test.
Later in his career, Brix began working under the name of Bruce Bennett, and went on to appear in more than a dozen films. In 1948's "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," he played a prospector who encounters Humphrey Bogart's character and later is killed by bandits. He also did TV guest appearances in series such as "The Virginian" and "Perry Mason."
Brix was said to have been a leading candidate to play Tarzan for MGM but he was sidelined by a broken shoulder he suffered while filming a football movie. Weismuller, an Olympic swimmer, was chosen for the 1932 movie "Tarzan the Ape Man" and went on to appear in a string of sequels.
By the 1960s, Brix went into the business world, becoming a regional sales manager for a Los Angeles vending machine company and had a successful real estate career before he retired in the mid-1980s.
Besides his son, Brix is survived by a daughter, Christina Katich, three grandchildren and two-great-grandchildren. Services were to be private.
