Nat Pendleton

Nathaniel Greene Pendleton was born on August 9, 1895, in Davenport, Iowa, to Adelaide Elizabeth Pendleton and Nathaniel Greene Pendleton, an attorney reported to be a descendant of American Revolutionary general Nathanael Greene. The family relocated to Cincinnati by March 1899 and later settled in New York. Pendleton attended Poly Prep High School in Brooklyn before enrolling at Columbia University, where he earned an economics degree in 1916 and developed fluency in four languages.

At Columbia, Pendleton captained the wrestling team and claimed the Eastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association championship in both 1914 and 1915. He was selected to represent the United States at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium, where he lost only a single match throughout the competition and received a silver medal. The outcome generated lasting controversy: his Olympic coach, George Pinneo, and teammate Fred Meyer both maintained that Pendleton had won his final match and deserved the gold. Pinneo later described the decision as the "most unpopular of many unsatisfactory decisions," while Meyer stated flatly, "Pendleton was the winner of that contest, no ifs or buts." Following the Games, Pendleton turned professional and aligned with promoter Jack Curley, who issued public challenges on his behalf, including a boast that Pendleton could defeat Ed "Strangler" Lewis and any other wrestler on the same night. On January 25, 1923, John Pesek met Pendleton in a legitimate contest and defeated and injured him. Pendleton continued competing professionally into the 1930s. In 2006, Columbia University inducted him into its wrestling hall of fame, and he is also a member of the Glen Brand Wrestling Hall of Fame in Waterloo, Iowa, and the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame in Cresco, Iowa.

Pendleton's Broadway career spanned 1925 to 1929 across three productions. He first appeared in Naughty Cinderella, which ran from November 9, 1925, to February 20, 1926, playing the character "K. O." Bill Smith. He returned to the stage in The Grey Fox, which ran from October 22, 1928, to January 5, 1929, in the role of Don Michelotto. His final Broadway credit was My Girl Friday, which opened February 12, 1929, and ran through September of that year, with Pendleton portraying Marcel the Great.

His film career began in the mid-1920s with uncredited and minor parts, eventually encompassing at least 94 short films and features. He was frequently typecast in supporting roles as slow-witted thugs, gangsters, and policemen, or as what were described as "befuddled good guys." In the 1932 Marx Brothers comedy Horse Feathers, he played one of two college football players who kidnap the characters portrayed by Harpo and Chico Marx. His most critically praised performance came in the 1936 production The Great Ziegfeld, in which he portrayed circus strongman Eugen Sandow. He appeared alongside the Marx Brothers again in their 1939 film At the Circus, once more as a circus strongman. Pendleton also took on recurring roles in two MGM series: he played ambulance driver Joe Wayman in the Dr. Kildare series and its spin-off Dr. Gillespie, and portrayed New York police lieutenant John Guild in The Thin Man series. His final screen appearances came in the 1947 releases Scared to Death, with Bela Lugosi, and Buck Privates Come Home, starring Abbott and Costello.

Among Pendleton's family connections, his uncle was Arthur V. Johnson, a pioneer actor and director of the early American silent film era. His brother Edmund Pendleton (1899–1987) was a music composer and served as choir master and organist for the American Church in Paris. Another brother, Steve Pendleton (1908–1984), worked as an American film and television actor. The 1920 census recorded Pendleton living in Manhattan with his wife, Juanita Alfonzo, and her brother Ramon Alfonso. He was later married to Margaret Evelyn "Barbara" Carse, who survived him. Pendleton died on October 12, 1967, in a San Diego, California hospital following a heart attack. A biography by Mike Chapman, devoted to his life, was published in 2015.