Lou Albano

Lou Albano married Geraldine, his high school sweetheart, in 1953. They had four children together, including a son named Carl, who has been serving as a member of the Putnam County Legislature since 2011.

After a health scare in the 1990s, Albano began to work out earnestly, eventually shedding 150 pounds (70kgs). He suffered a heart attack in 2005, but made recovery. On October 14, 2009, at 76 years of age, he passed away due to heart failure. At the time, he was living in hospice care.

Louis Vincent "Lou" Albano was born on July 29, 1933, in Rome, Lazio, in what was then the Kingdom of Italy. His parents Eleanor and Carmen were of Italian ancestry but were born and raised in America. Carmen was an obstetrician while Eleanor was a pianist who later became a registered nurse. They moved to Italy in the early 1930s.

Shortly after Albano’s baptism, which was performed in the Vatican itself, Albano’s parents returned to the US and began living in the Mount Vernon area. He had eight siblings, four of whom survived childhood.

He studied at Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, New York where he first demonstrated his athletic abilities. He not only participated in the track and field events, but was also picked as the captain of his school’s football team. Amazingly, he received scholarship offers from 32 colleges as a senior.

He eventually picked the University of Tennessee for their excellent football program. However, he was expelled a year later due to his poor attitude and an attempt to cheat in the final examination.

He then enlisted in the US Army. But the injuries that he had sustained during his football days forced him to accept an honourable discharge after just eight months.

Following his retirement from medicine, Albano’s father wanted to start an insurance business with him, but Albano had already decided to try his luck as a professional boxer.

He met Willie Gilzenberg, a boxing promoter who would later serve as the titular president of World Wide Wrestling Federation (WWWF), an early version of WWF/E. Due to Albano’s short stature, Gilzenberg advised him to enter wrestling. He trained with Soldier Barry, one of his childhood idols, and they started doing house shows together in New York in 1952.

The original stories involving him referred to him as the “pretty boy”. His character was a babyface known as the “Leaping Lou Albano”. However, following a non-wrestling injury that left a gash on his forehead, he purposefully did not let the mark heal completely and turned heel. He adopted a new name, “Mount Vernon Mauler”, garnering a reputation in the New York’s professional wrestling scene. During this period, Gilzenberg introduced him to Vince McMahon Sr, who hired him for his Capitol Wrestling Corporation in Washington, DC, a predecessor of WWF/E.

Albano spent the rest of his professional career with the promotion and while as a solo wrestler he was quite unimpressive, his work with tag-team partner Tony Altomare did garner him some success, including the WWF Tag Team Championship in 1967.

It was Bruno Sammartino who suggested to McMahon that Albano, a mediocre wrestler at best, would better serve the promotion if he was attached to a wrestler as a spokesperson.

Albano made his screen debut in 1952 in CBS’ ‘The Jackie Gleason Show’. Due to his busy schedule as a WWF employee, it would take him another 37 years to land his first significant credit. In 1989, he was cast as the voice of Mario in ‘The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!’ He would later reprise the character in ‘The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3’ (1990).

In 1986, he made his cinematic debut in the crime comedy ‘Wise Guys’. His other important works include musical comedy ‘Body Slam’ (1986), action comedy ‘Complex World’ (1992), adventure fantasy ‘Stay Tuned’, and family-mystery series ‘Ghostwriter’. Albano’s final film ‘Hot Ice, No-one Is Safe’ was posthumously released in 2010.