Gordon Mitchell, born Charles Allen Pendleton (Denver, July 29, 1923) is an American actor and bodybuilder who made a lot of B movies.
Charles Allen Pendleton was born in Denver, Colorado, and began working out in his Denver neighbourhood to deal with his tough companions. During World War II he served in the U.S. Army in the Battle of the Bulge where he was taken prisoner of war. He later obtained a degree at the University of Southern California under the G.I. Bill. He became a high school teacher and guidance counselorin Los Angeles, where due to his physique he was given classes containing many delinquent students.
Following a return enlistment for the Korean War, he found film extra work in movies such as "Prisoner of War", "The Man with the Golden Arm" and Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments", where he and his friend Joe Gold dragged Charlton Heston's Moses to Pharaoh Yul Brynner. Mae West chose him to appear in her nightclub act as part of her "buffed all-male chorus line".
He was one of the American bodybuilder-actors who migrated to Italy in the wake of Steve Reeves' success in the 1958 film "Hercules" after he sent a photo to an Italian producer who signed him on a contract. Prior to going to Italy, he saw a clairvoyant who asked him if he had ever been known by the name of Gordon Mitchell. He replied no, but on arrival in Rome, Mitchell was given his new name. He found work first in sword and sandal films such as "Ali Baba and the Seven Saracens", "Seven Slaves Against the World", "Treasure of the Petrified Forest", then in Spaghetti Westerns such as "Beyond the Law" and "Savage Guns". Mitchell also appeared in "Satyricon" (1969), directed by Federico Fellini.
From the early 1970s onwards, he started to diversify into everything from horror, such as "Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks" (1974).