As His Juicy Memoir Hits Shelves, Snakkle Looks Back on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Career

Believe it or not, Arnie was once little! Here's a vintage middle school photo of Schwarzenegger before he started lifting weights at 15.

At 15, Schwarzenegger started to consider bodybuilding and weightlifting a serious pursuit. He hit the gym regularly, studied psychology to better understand the relationship between the body and mind, and started an intensive program with coach Dan Farmer. Five years after he started bulking up, Schwarzenegger won the Mr. Universe contest (now the World Amateur Bodybuilding Championship) at only 20 years old! Talk about mind over matter.

Schwarzenegger's domination in bodybuilding contests landed him a role in his first movie, Pumping Iron, which exposes the extreme lengths that bodybuilders go to for their sport. In 1976, the filmmakers of Pumping Iron convinced Schwarzenegger to lose weight in order to film his training for the 1975 Mr. Olympia contest. Schwarzenegger had just three months to rebuild himself for the competition. Seeing as the film was only partially scripted, Schwarzenegger's debut as an actor playing himself wasn't a far stretch from the truth.

Schwarzenegger continued to land roles as a bodybuilder in films and in 1976 played Joe Santo in Stay Hungry. The dramatic comedy proved that Schwarzenegger could do more than play himself, and he won himself a Golden Globe for for Best Acting Debut in a Motion Picture.

Having retired from bodybuilding to pursue acting, Schwarzenegger took on the role of Conan in the fantasy movie Conan the Barbarian in 1982. However, after training for 18 months for his role as a young barbarian, he thought himself in such good shape that he decided to come out of retirement and compete for the 1980 Mr. Olympia title one last time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Schwarzenegger won the Mr. Olympia competition for his seventh and final time.

In 1984, Schwarzenegger landed his iconic role as the Terminator in James Cameron's science fiction thriller of the same name. The Terminator was a box-office hit and catapulted both James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger to fame, solidifying their places in Hollywood. Schwarzenegger appeared twice more in the Terminator sequels as the chilly robot assassin with a dry sense of humor.

In 1977, Schwarzenegger met Maria Shriver, the niece of President John F. Kennedy, at the Robert F. Kennedy Tennis Tournament. When they started dating, Schwarzenegger was also still seeing Sue Moray, with whom he had an open relationship. He continued to see both women until Moray issued an ultimatum in 1978. Schwarzenegger chose to stay with Shriver, and the couple married in April 1986. Sadly, the first year of their relationship may have been a harbinger for their separation in 2011 after 25 years of marriage in the wake of the highly publicized scandal that he had a love child with a household employee.

After a number of successful movies, Schwarzenegger starred in another science fiction thrilled as Douglas Quaid in Total Recall. He earned $10 million plus 15% of the gross profits, making him a top-billing A-lister.

True Lies reunited Schwarzenegger with director James Cameron once again in 1994. Schwarzenegger played Harry Tasker, a spy for the U.S. government who moonlights as a dull computer salesman. When Harry's wife, Helen (played by Curtis), is kidnapped by another spy, chaos ensues when Harry works to get Helen back and, in the process, work on their marriage. The action comedy was a box-office hit, proving that the Cameron-Schwarzenegger team was a recipe for success.

Despite never having held public office or having a political presence in California, Schwarzenegger announced his decision to run for governor of California in the 2003 recall election of Governor Gray Davis on an episode of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Schwarzenegger made international news and was quickly nicknamed "The Governator" in reference to his Terminator role. As a foreign-born citizen and A-list celebrity actor running as a Republican, but married to Maria Shriver of the famously Democratic Kennedy family, Schwarzenegger made for an interesting candidate to say the least. He won the election by 1.3 million votes and was reelected in 2006, proving that yet again, Schwarzenegger could pull off a huge career change.

In 2011, Schwarzenegger announced that he was considering a return to acting. Amidst the media frenzy surrounding his separation from Maria Shriver, Schwarzenegger committed to a cameo appearance in the 2012 film The Expendables 2, a sequel to The Expendables, in which Schwarzenegger made a cameo appearance in 2010. At 65, Schwarzenegger is a bodybuilding icon, an A-list actor, and a political figure. Not bad for an Austro-American who still can't shake his trademark accent.