Give Arnie a black leather jacket, pump action shot gun, Harley Fatboy and some cracking one-liners and what do you get? The Terminator, that's what. And he will be back, oh yes
No one, and I mean no one, has ever looked harder on a bike than big Arnie in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
With cool shades, spiked hair, Mad Max-style leather jacket and sawn-off shotgun, Arnie sat astride a Harley-Davidson Fat Boy like no man has done before or since. Pure menace.
The image is still a postcard and poster favourite and must be doing no harm to sales of said Fat Boy. But since there's usually a two year waiting list in the States for a new Harley anyway, it's not like the firm needed a sales boost.
Arnie actually owns a Harley in real life (as well as a Gulf Stream private jet, Mercedes SL600, Porsche 911, Carrera Convertible and various other modes of transport), but gunning fat V-twins off bridges isn't really his style and certainly not to the taste of his insurers, so the film's mega bike chase was performed by Hollywood stuntman Peter Kent on a bike supplied by Gene Thomason Harley Davidson in California. The firm also supplied bikes for The Crow, Pulp Fiction and Harley-Davidson and the Marlboro Man.
In one of the most famous bike chase scenes of all time, Kent jumps the Fat Boy off a bridge into a stormwater canal in pursuit of a young John Connor played by Edward Furlong. The bike was too heavy to make the landing so it was supported by one inch steel cables which meant the bike effectually weighed just 81 kilos (180lbs) when it landed. A Fat Boy usually weighs 295 kilos (649lbs). The cables were digitally removed in post production. Clever eh?
Arnie, who was born in 1947, also gets to deliver one of the coolest lines in the film as he commandeers the bike from its rightful owner: "I need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle." And since Arnie was payed almost £10 million for muttering just 700 words of dialogue, that one line earned him a cool £120,000! Nice work if you can get it.
The 1991 James Cameron-directed film was a smash hit follow up to 1984's original Terminator and established Schwarzenegger as one of the coolest biking heroes ever seen on the silver screen. By the by, Schwarzenegger actually means 'black ploughman' but it's probably not wise to remind the bloke of that next time you see him down the boozer.
The actual bike used in the film eventually found its way to the Costa Mesa Planet Hollywood restaurant in California where it was displayed until the branch was closed in 1999. Arnie backed out of the chain last year leaving fellow hard nut celebs Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis to get on with cooking and washing up.
The Austrian born actor and former Mr Universe began his movie career in body building flick Stay Hungry in the late '70s. The Guinness Book of Records once called him 'the most perfectly shaped man in the history of the world' and who are we to argue? Bet he couldn't get into off the peg one-piece leathers though, the fat bastard.
