‘I was a martial artist who loved Bruce Lee,’ he says.
Opening in 1987, Bloodsport, the supposedly true story of a no-holds-barred fighting tournament called the Kumite, made eleven million dollars at the box office, and introduced Van Damme’s trademark splits and spinning 360˚ heel kick to an American audience.Ī youthful Scott Adkins, who appears as Van Damme’s henchman Hector in The Expendables 2, was blown away. His next project, however, would finally see him crotch-punch his way to the big time. With little money and speaking virtually no English, Van Damme toiled for a couple of years in low-paid jobs before eventually landing his first credited film role, as the minor character ‘Gay Karate Man’ in the unspectacular 1984 feature Monaco Forever.Īfter this inauspicious start, Van Damme plugged away for a few more years, narrowly missing out on the title role opposite fellow Expendable Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1987 action classic Predator. In 1982, Van Damme moved to LA to seek fame and fortune as a martial-arts movie star. I believe that it helped to make me more determined to become the man that I am.’ ‘As a kid, I was skinny and I wasn’t very flexible,’ he says, ‘so I had to work hard to get to where I am today. Looking back, he says, it was his lack of natural athleticism that motivated him. He’d also started lifting weights to improve his physique, a project that culminated with him winning a national bodybuilding title. By his early twenties, Van Damme had earned his shotokan black belt, represented Belgium at the 1979 European Championships and compiled an 18-1 record as a professional kickboxer, all under his birth name of Van Varenberg. Over the next ten years, he improved rapidly, regularly competing in semi-contact karate tournaments. ‘I was kind of geeky, and physically I was not gifted.’ The turning point came when, at the age of ten, his father enrolled him at the local shotokan karate school. There was little about his childhood to suggest he would grow up to be the self-professed Fred Astaire of karate.
Van Damme grew up in the 1960s in a sleepy suburb on the outskirts of Brussels.
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