Kjell Nilsson (born 1949) is a Swedish olympic-class weight lifter and actor. His best known role is his 1981 portrayal of a biker gang leader in Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior.

[edit] Career

Nilsson was a former olympic-class weight lifter who was born in Gothenburg, Sweden. He moved to Australia in 1980 to train Swedish athletes for the Moscow Olympics. In Australia, he met actress Kate Ferguson, and they married in Sweden. She persuaded him to return to Australia and to look for work in the Australian film industry.

In the 1981 post-apocalyptic science fiction action film Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, he played the main antagonist "Lord Humungus", the leader of a gang of marauders that besiege a settler compound in the Australian wastelands. Although he leads a rag-tag band of biker-berserkers, Humungus's speeches to the settlers exhorting them to surrender are articulate and convincing, and he uses his eloquence as psychological warfare. Time magazine reviewer stated that in Nilsson's portrayal, "malevolence courses through his huge pectorals, [and] pulses visibly under his bald, sutured scalp."^[1]

A year later, he appeared in The Pirate Movie (1982), a musical and comedy film directed by Ken Annakin and starring Christopher Atkins and Kristy McNichol. In 1984, he had a role in the TV movie Man of Letters, and in 1987, he played the role of a male nurse in The Edge of Power.

[edit] References

1. ^ Apocalypse... Pow! - TIME

• Kjell Nilsson at the Internet Movie Database
• Kjell Nilsson

This Sweden-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v • d • e