Background
He was born Gordon Merrill Werschkul in Portland, Oregon, one of nine children of advertising man Stanley Werschkul and his wife Alice.
He was born Gordon Merrill Werschkul in Portland, Oregon, one of nine children of advertising man Stanley Werschkul and his wife Alice.
Scott was raised in Oregon and attended the University of Oregon, located in Eugene, Oregon, for one semester.
Gordon Scott was the eleventh Tarzan, starting with Tarzan’s Hidden Jungle (1955). He was "discovered" poolside, and offered "a 7 year contract, a loin cloth, and a new last name." Upon leaving school, he was drafted into the United States Army in 1944. He served as a drill sergeant and military policeman until he was honorably discharged in 1947.
He then worked at a variety of jobs until 1953, when he was spotted by a talent agent while working as a lifeguard at the Sahara Hotel and Casino, located on the Las Vegas Strip in Nevada.
"Due in part to his muscular frame and 6-foot-3-inch (191-metre) height, he was quickly signed to replace Lex Barker as Tarzan" by producer Sol Lesser. Lesser had Gordon change his name because "Werschkul" sounded too much like "Weismueller".
Scott"s Tarzan movies ranged from rather cheap re-edited television pilots to large-scale action films with high-production values shot on actual African locations. In his early, he played the character as unworldly and inarticulate, in the mold of Johnny Weissmuller, an earlier Tarzan portrayer.
In Scott"s later films, after a change in producers, he played a Tarzan who was educated and spoke perfect English, as in the original Edgar Rice Burroughs novels.
Scott was the only actor to play Tarzan in both styles. Fearing he would become typecast as Tarzan, Scott moved to Italy and became a popular star of what were known as sword-and-sandal epics, featuring handsome bodybuilders as various characters from Greek and Roman myth. Scott also played Hercules in a couple of international co-productions during the mid-1960s.
As the Peplum film genre faded, Scott starred in spaghetti westerns and Eurospy films.
His final film appearance was in The Tramplers (filmed in 1966. Released in the United States in 1968).
Scott died, aged 80, in Baltimore, Maryland, of lingering complications from multiple heart surgeries earlier in the year. He is buried in the Kensico Cemetery, located in Valhalla, New New York