Reg Park: The Leeds bodybuilder who inspired Arnold Schwarzenegger

Arnold Schwarzenegger's rise from bodybuilding pin-up to movie superstardom and, ultimately, US politics, is well-documented.

But perhaps less well-known is the role a Yorkshireman played in inspiring a young "Arnie" to pick up the weights which would ultimately propel him to fame and fortune.

It was as a teenager growing up in Graz, Austria, that Schwarzenegger one day spotted a bodybuilding magazine.

On the cover was a man named Reg Park.

Six decades later, Schwarzenegger continues to name-check Park as a key mentor and the "blueprint" for his life.

The 76-year-old Terminator star and former Governor of California is on the promotional circuit with a new motivational book, Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life.

He told the BBC Radio Four Today programme on Thursday that he owed his success to many people.

He said: "Because I am a creation of a lot of help: my parents, my coaches, my teachers, my mentors that motivated me and got me where I am today, including a British bodybuilder by the name of Reg Park, who was from Leeds and won Mr Universe three times.

"[He also] did Hercules movies, and I saw him as Hercules when I was 15 years old. Without people like that I would not have ever made it. I have to give credit to those people."

Who was Reg Park?

Born in Leeds in 1928, Reg Park went on to win the Mr Universe competition in 1951, 1958, and 1965.

He even starred in movies as Hercules and Samson. He was everything that Schwarzenegger aspired to be.

His was a no-frills approach to body-building, using what he had, when he could, and despite the vagaries of Yorkshire weather.

Interviewed in the 1980s Park said: "I trained in my back garden, through the winter, wearing three sweatsuits, two pairs of socks, and a pair of army boots.

"We would have the weights on the back grass – the back lawn – and we’d have a tarpaulin over the weights, which we’d throw to one side to take the snow and the rain off.

"And then we’d continue and start working out."

Park's success as a bodybuilder led to him starring as Hercules in a quadrilogy of Italian "sword-and-sandal" movies. He appeared as Samson in a fifth.

Such was his appeal that Schwarzenegger, still a teenager, travelled to the UK to train with him and, later, to compete against him.

Those were formative days for the young Austrian who, by his own admission, copied everything that Park did - and said.

On a trip to Leeds Schwarzenegger watched in amazement as Park addressed a 2,000-strong crowd and gave a lengthy unscripted speech.

Schwarzenegger recalled: "I’m looking at this and saying to myself, 'He didn’t have a piece of paper in front of him. How could he speak like that for 15 minutes?'

"I said to him afterwards: 'I’m in awe'."

The next day, in Newcastle, Park invited Schwarzenegger onto the stage, handed him a microphone, told him what to say, and the 19-year-old - by now Park’s training partner - received a huge round of applause.

Schwarzenegger said: "I was watching everything that Reg Park does, because I’m emulating him and I want to copy everything that he does.

"Little incremental things, of him feeding me lines... A year later it got bigger, the speeches got bigger, and I started feeling comfortable in front of a microphone. And the rest is history."

Schwarzenegger would later eclipse Reg Park in the bodybuilding world, winning five Mr Universe titles and winning Mr Olympia seven times.

Perhaps inevitably, the movies followed, with Schwarzenegger - his thick Austrian accent dubbed by an actor - making his debut in 1970's Hercules in New York.

In the 1980s and into the 1990s he was arguably the biggest box office draw in the world.

Looking back on his influence on Schwarzenegger, Park said his brief movie career, allied to that of another bodybuilder, Steve Reeves, "publicised and popularised body-building, and then I think this culminated with the appearance of Arnold."

Asked to comment on his role as mentor, he added: "I’m delighted. I’m also very happy.

"If I can motivate people to improve themselves in any form throughout their whole-make-up – physically [or] ambition-wise, as in Arnold’s case – then I’m delighted that I have this effect on people."

Born in 1928, Reg Park died in South Africa in 2007, aged 79.