Bartolomeo Pagano

Biography

When director Giovanni Pastrone went hunting for a Herculean presence to anchor his 1914 epic Cabiria, he found the real thing hauling freight on the Genoa docks. Dock-worker Bartolomeo Pagano, 24, stood six-foot-two, weighed 220 pounds of solid muscle, and had never acted a day in his life; Pastrone handed him the role of Maciste, the loyal slave who bends iron bars the way other men twiddle breadsticks. Audiences roared, and Pagano—shrewd and suddenly famous—legally traded his birth name for the hero’s, becoming “Maciste” on- and off-screen. Over the next fourteen years he headlined twenty-seven silent adventures, flexing through sandstorms, volcanoes, and centuries of costume changes while Italy’s movie-mad public followed his every curl. When he died in 1930 at forty, the mantle of Maciste didn’t retire; studios simply recruited new muscle and kept the legend alive, proof that the character had eclipsed the man who first gave him breath.