Crocodile Dundee's - wild ride

HIS HIT 1986 FILM MADE HIM A GLOBAL SENSATION. NOW AT 81, PAUL HOGAN LOOKS BACK ON THE STARDOM HE NEVER EXPECTED

One time, Australian actor Paul Hogan was taking a walk in Franklin Canyon in Los Angeles when he came upon two women in a panic. “They said, ‘Oh, thank God, it’s you!’” recalls Hogan, 81. “They told me, ‘Around the bend is the biggest rattlesnake we’ve ever seen! We’re so lucky that Crocodile Dundee is here; he’ll know what to do! ” Hogan laughs at the memory. “They assumed I’d go and wring its neck. Fortunately for me, by the time I went and looked for it, it had gone.”

BEFORE HE WAS FAMOUS

Before he found TV stardom, Hogan worked as a rigger, a high-risk job placing platforms for workers on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. (Left, he returned to pose on the bridge in 1976.) Once, a man jumped from the bridge as Hogan and his co-workers tried to talk him down. In a 2014 documentary, Hogan said he drew from the troubling experience for a scene in Crocodile Dundee, in which he dissuades an office worker from jumping off a building.

That wasn’t the first or the last time people confused Hogan with the character he created for his hit 1986 film Crocodile Dundee, a fish-out-of-water comedy about a tough Australian bushwhacker named Mick Dundee who winds up in New York City. The movie, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay, made him a superstar in the United States. “For quite a few years, I was never Paul Hogan,” he says. “Americans thought Croc Dundee was real, mainly because unlike people in Australia or the UK, they’d never seen me in anything else.”

“I got blown away meeting big stars … I had dinner with Liz Taylor” – HOGAN