His daughter Rafaella produced the film while director John Milius rewrote a script by Oliver Stone, bringing Howard’s lost “Hyborian Age” to life alongside cinematographer Duke Callaghan, costume designer John Bloomfield, production designer Ron Cobb and Pier Luigi Basile’s Art Direction team.

By 1979, legendary producer Dino De Laurentiis had the rights. Howard and the idea of a Conan film started circulating in the early 1970s, around when Marvel started publishing comics about the character. While Schwarzenegger had appeared in a couple of films before, Conan the Barbarian’s release amid a sea of fantasy adventure films in the 1980s set him up to define a decade and a half of Hollywood action cinema.Ĭonan was created in 1932 by author Robert E. The 1975 tournament became the subject of the docudrama Pumping Iron which helped jumpstart he and rival Lou Ferrigno’s acting careers. Olympia from 1970 to 1975-and again in 1980. Universe, winning it three more times consecutively (1968-1970) and winning Mr. Born in Austria in 1947, the son of a policeman that joined the Nazis, he began weightlifting in his teen years, and at 20 became the youngest person to ever win Mr. Schwarzenegger is probably the most famous bodybuilder and one of the most famous actors to ever live, and one of the few to go on to hold public office. It was peak 1980s fantasy action and it led to Schwarzenegger becoming the go-to hero for mainstream Hollywood action, usually with guns instead of swords. As Conan the Barbarian reaches its 40th birthday, there’s no better time to remember the cult classic epic fantasy that helped begin Arnold Schwarzenegger’s acting career.

Arnold cinema movies