Profile of Mike Monty on Famous Like Me

Mike Monty (actor)

Mike Monty was an United States character actor, born in 1936 in Chattanooga, Tennessee as Michael O'Donahue.

He left the United States for Italy in the early 60s, where he started a modest film career as a supporting actor, appearing mostly in spaghetti westerns, sexploitation and horror. Many of his appearances were uncredited. Some were credited as Mike Monti, Michael Monty or Mike Monte.

One of the more infamous films he acted in during the 70's was the Nazi-exploitation epic Achtung! The Desert Tigers!, directed by Paolo Solvay and starring fellow American expatriates Richard Harrison and Gordon Mitchell (with whom Monty shared an apartment for several years in Italy). Solvay was notorious for recycling scenes from film to film. Achtung! The Desert Tigers was no exception to the rule, featuring footage from his WW II epic Quando Suana la Campana AKA When the Bell Tolls (1970).

In the early 80's Monty relocated to the Philippines, where he began a very prolific career in Z-grade action films, many of them made for Silver Star Film Company, produced by K.Y. Lim. Over the decade, he appeared in countless low-budget Filipino features and some Italian productions shot in the archipelago, often cast as a military officer or a policeman, in parts very similar to Richard Crenna in First Blood. Although he wasn't a great actor, Monty was tall, thin, straight-postured and gaunt, which translated well to military characters.

He made several films with fellow Filipino Exploitation actors Romano Kristoff, James Gaines, Mike Cohen, Bruce Baron, Ann Milhench, Gwendolyn Hung, Ronnie Patterson, and directors Teddy Page (Teddy Chiu) and John Gale (Jun Gallardo). One of his larger roles from the Filipino period was in the Rambo-imitation Slash, directed by Gale and starring Kristoff and Hung. Monty also appeared in all of the films Richard Harrison made in the Philippines: as a POW in Intrusion Cambodia AKA Rescue Team, a police chief in Fireback and as a gangster in Blood Debts. The Silver Star films, otherwise fallen into obscurity, have become minor cult items among some bad movie fans.

His more well-known films from the 80's were Italian productions such as The Atlantis Interceptors, directed by Ruggero Deodato and starring Christopher Connelly and Tony King, and Captain Yankee, directed by Antonio Margheriti and starring Christopher Connelly and Lee Van Cleef. Monty also had a very small part in the Fred Williamson vehicle Black Cobra 2. Arguably one of Monty's better Philippines-shot films was the American low-budget Vietnam War film Dog Tags for director Romano Scavolini.

His acting career dwindled with the near demise of the Filipino film industry at the turn of the 90's.

Mike Monty still lives in the Philippines, now mostly retired from acting. His most recent film appearance was in Bruno Mattei's 2004 film The Tomb.

A Partial Filmography

They Called Him Trinity (1972)

Dr. Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks (1974)

Achtung! The Desert Tigers (1977)

Fireback (credited as a 1978 film on imdB, more likely from the early 80's)

The Atlantis Interceptors (1983)

Blood Debts AKA Eliminator (1983)

Intrusion Cambodia AKA Rescue Team (1984)

Slash (1984)

Ninja's Force (1985)

Captain Yankee (1985)

Strike Commando (1987)

Black Cobra 2 (1988)

Zombi 3 (1988)

Dog Tags (1990)

Mondo Cannibale (2003)

The Tomb (2004)

Memorable lines

"He can turn an ordinary soft drink straw into a weapon." (Fireback)

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Mike Monty