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Arnold Schwarzenegger is the biggest movie star in the world. His face is familiar to people even in the most remote, isolated parts of the globe. His multimillion dollar salaries are the highest ever paid to a performer, and his movies are the biggest, most expensive, special-effects/action vehicles ever produced. Indeed, this 43-year-old native of Graz, Austria, has come a long way from his humble origins. Besides film stardom, his international fame encompasses a highly visible marriage to television newscaster Maria Shriver (and therefore entry into the Kennedy clan), chumminess with American Presidents, and a growing business empire.

All this may seem like sheer luck, but if you ask the man himself, it was more the result of hard work, a relentless desire to succeed, and an incredibly strong sense of self-worth.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was born July 30, 1947, to a hausfrau mother and a police chief father who was once Europe's champion ice curler. Both parents instilled in him a sense of ambition. By the time he was 15, he was pumping iron, opting to become a bodybuilder.

Arnold: first row, 2nd from left

"At first," he admitted, "it was just another competitive sport, a way of getting to the top. Then I realized it was actually an art form as well. I could change my body from one form to another. It was very close to sculpture." Arnold considers his "healthy upbringing" a factor in his future success. "The only thing we didn't have was money," he recalled. "I had a lot of attention from my parents, a lot of love, and enough food-even though, growing up after the war was tough. From the beginning, he knew what he wanted. For inspiration, he hung a picture of Reg Park, a former Mr. Universe, on his wall. "When I got into bodybuilding I said, 'This is it! I want to be Mr. Universe!' I always had a clear vision of what I wanted in front of me .... If you don't question whether you can make it, you're much more at ease. And you can't wait for the next push-up, the next workout, because you want to turn this vision into reality."

At 18, he was Mr. Europe Jr. and two years later he became the youngest Mr. Universe ever. "Arnold wouldn't be content with anything less than perfection," Maria Shriver told 'Time'. Her Maria Shiver told Time. Her husband agrees: "I'm always hungry for more," he admitted. "I'm never satisfyed. I was always very alive, hungry for doing things better than others. I'd set myself goals and then go after them with all my energy. Big goals."

After spending a year in the Austrian army, Arnold, whose last name means "black plowman", studied marketing for two years at the University of Munich. At the invitation of muscle entrepreneur Joe Weider, he came to the United States in 1968.

Coming to America was a natural extension of his self-image. "I always felt I had an American mentality," he explained. "I was born in the wrong country. When I came here, I was immediately sucked into the notion that everything was possible and that people were open-minded. I loved it.

Americans don't start out with negative attitudes as they do in Europe. People think big about achieving and making money and improving themselves. The whole idea of continuous progress."

That's precisely what the Austrian muscleman kept doing. Despite being staggered in 1972 by the deaths of his brother and father, Arnold persevered. Five times Mr. Universe and seven times Mr. Olympia, he started pondering his options for an all-out assault on a larger kind of fame, a higher level of success through movies, mainly. He realized he had to market himself on the basis of his attributes, and he has done so very shrewdly.

"When you have a unique look and a unique body like mine," he said, "you have to ask yourself, 'Is this a role that anybody else could play?' I don't want to fyll in for Joe Rlow."

Indeed, from an unimpressive debut in movies, Schwarzenegger has gone on to star in some of the most popular movies ever made from the historical fantasy sagas Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer to the smashing sci-fi thrillers The Terminator, Total Recall, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, to the mega-hit comedies Twins and Kindergarten Cop.

Arnold's strategy for success in movies had to do with a gradual "easing out into other areas." As he put it a couple of years ago, "I want to do different things, but not the opposite of what I've done, because that won't be justifiable from a business point of view. If you change everything abruptly, the audience won't go to see your movie. It's got to be gradual. Even in the beginning, I never said, 'Now I'm an actor, not a bodybuilder.' I didn't want to alienate my bodybuilding fans. It's the same with movies: if I inject some humor into my parts, at some point I could do a comedy. That's what I want to get into."

His game plan has worked and he has accomplished exactly what he set out to do, having surpassed in popularity and box-office grosses his main action-film competitor, Sylvester Stallone, and even Clint Eastwood, a man he admires. Not that Arnold has ever limited himself to acting.

His business acumen has proved to be equally impressive. From his office in Santa Monica -he will soon move to bigger headquarters- he oversees a real estate empire, a mail order business, and various bodybuilding enterprises.

Arnold's triumph is particularly sweet because he achieved it in the face of ridicule and doubts from just about the entire movie industry they laughed at his name, his accent, and his unusual looks. They're not laughing any more. In addition to his Hollywood success, Arnold has authored four best-selling books about bodybuilding, issues his own fitness videotapes, and lectures about sports before live audiences and on television. He gives his time and energy generously to young people in his capacity as Chairman of the President's Council on Fitness, insisting time and again that kids must be in good physical shape if they are to carve for themselves the lives they crave. He has also devoted time to the Special Olympics, and has been its national weight training coach for the past decade. In addition, he has been instrumental in implementing a prisoner rehab program through weight resistance training.

Known for his conservative politics, Arnold has been chummy with Presidents Reagan and Bush, but he insists that he just wants to make a contribution, make a positive impact on the system. He claims not to have ambition to run for office himself.

Much has been written about the irony of an arch Republican being married to an ultra-liberal.

But Arnold and Maria know how to juggle differences of opinion, and have learned to agree to disagree. "I respect her point of view," Arnold asserted, "and she respects mine." They met in 1977 and were married nine years later. To date, they seem to have avoided conflicts that might have arisen because of their respective careers. "I'm an independent person," Arnold said, "independent enough to understand that Maria needs her own life and career and I'm very happy that she's goal-oriented and wants to accomplish a lot of things and be competitive out there."

His wife also helped him change his view about women. "When I left Europe," he laughed, "my ideal woman was the one who stayed at home and followed her husband. But I grew up and got re-educated here and understood the value of women doing their own thing." So much so, in fact, that he recently told USA Today, "At home, Maria is the Terminator!"

Although he has achieved almost everything one could aspire to, including a beautiful daughter named Katherine, Schwarzenegger refuses to become complacent - nor does he make the mistake of believing the Schwarzenegger hype that issues from movie - studio publicity departments. "Being the most muscular man in the world is funny," he admitted. "You have to be able to step back and look at yourself and then have a good laugh. Or the idea of being a great actor. That's a joke, too.

"I don't want to be taken overly seriously by anybody," he continued, "because I'm not a very serious person. I'm having fun making movies that entertain people. I don't sit there thinking about the craft of acting and getting traumatized. Why should I? My movies are hits and my books are best-sellers, but I don't feel 'successful.' Maybe people think, 'Is there something he can't do! He must think he's King Kong!' But that's not it. I struggle every day with my life and career, like everybody else."

Somehow, it's comforting to realize that this larger-than-life man, an "achiever" in every sense of the word, is not really a superman at all. He enjoys the fantasy, but lives the reality. He knows that life doesn't necessarily imitate the movies. Schwarzenegger has found success not through magic or happenstance, but through hard work and determination. In that, we can all take a measure of inspiration.

Here are also two articles I found on the net, take also a look at them:

[Achievements | ... some more Arnold] Check it out!