Man Mountain Dean
| Man Mountain Dean | |
|---|---|
Wrestler Frank Leavitt, Chicago, Illinois, 1924
|
|
| Birth name | Frank Simmons Leavitt |
| Born |
June 30, 1891 New York City, U.S. |
| Died | May 29, 1953 (aged 61) Norcross, Georgia, U.S. |
| Spouse(s) | Doris Dean |
| Professional wrestling career | |
| Ring name(s) | Soldier Leavitt Hell's Kitchen Bill-Bill Stone Mountain |
| Billed height | 5 ft 11 in (1.80 m) |
| Billed weight | 310 lb (140 kg) |
Man Mountain Dean (June 30, 1891 – May 29, 1953), born Frank Simmons Leavitt, was a professional wrestler of the early 1900s.
Leavitt was born in New York City, the son of John McKenney Leavitt and Henrietta N. (née Decker) Leavitt. From childhood, Leavitt was above average in size and strength. This led to a lifelong interest in competitive sport, and also enabled him to lie about his age in order to join the Army at the age of fourteen.
While enlisted he saw duty on the Mexico–United States border with John J. Pershing, and was later sent to France where he participated in combat during World War I. Also during this period (1914) he began his wrestling career using the ring name of "Soldier Leavitt".
After the war, Leavitt embarked on a career in athletics. Although he played with the New York Brickley Giants of the National Football League from 1919–20, he concentrated most of his efforts on professional wrestling. He competed in the ring for a time under the name "Hell's Kitchen Bill-Bill" (a "hillbilly" reference which was suggested to him by the writer Damon Runyon) but eventually settled on the moniker of "Stone Mountain".
Leavitt wrestled with limited success at first, and after an injury took a job as a police officer in Miami, Florida. Here he met his wife, Doris Dean, who also became his manager. At her suggestion, in 1932 he adopted the nickname "Man Mountain" and substituted the more Anglo-Saxon-sounding last name of Dean. At a stocky 5'11" and weighing over 300 pounds, Dean was an imposing figure. He also grew a long, full beard as part of his ring persona. Dean was one of the first professional wrestlers to emphasize showmanship in the sport, and it worked to his advantage.
After a successful wrestling tour of Germany which had been booked by his wife, Doris Dean, he was invited to take a job in the UK as stunt-double for Charles Laughton in the movie The Private Life of Henry VIII. This would be the beginning of a subsidiary movie career for Dean, who would appear in various roles in twelve other movies, playing himself in five of them. One of the movies in which he portrayed himself was the Joe E. Brown comedy The Gladiator, a 1938 adaptation of Philip Gordon Wylie's 1930 novel Gladiator.
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