The story of Maurice Tiye - the real Shrek from Chelyabinsk. The real Shrek from Chelyabinsk. The story of Maurice Tillet The last years of his life

In half a century, animators will measure him. Who would have thought that Maurice Tiye, once nicknamed the French Angel, would once again attract the attention of the whole world, now as a fairy-tale character named Shrek, which means “horror” in Yiddish.

The giant was of medium height. And still made a killer impression - is it a man? When the giant smiled at you, I wanted to move a couple of steps away, or better yet. He was a heavyweight wrestler, this Maurice Tillet, and moreover, he had an appearance that even fellow ringmates oohed at. Already the very sight of him was a hook. Parents frightened their children with "Tie the cannibal" and were themselves afraid - what if they get hungry? That was his stage image.

He was a rare man, just a collector's item. Today, his life-size bust is kept in two American museums - anthropological and sports. And in the International Wrestling Museum there is also a small, about a minute, video of one of his performances. It is said that he was good at "bear hugs", which he applied to opponents around the ring, squeezing them until his lungs ran out of air. This quality - the strength of the monster - was also unique, like his appearance. Since the rare disease that Maurice suffered from a young age, according to doctors, never changes a person in better side. Health does not add, beauty and strength too. Tiye, on the other hand, was unusually strong, there was no one to even compare with. Big-eyed merry fellows on the Internet somehow noticed his resemblance to our contemporary, also an athlete and also amazing in appearance. Tiye was even called the grandfather of our Valuev a couple of times. Nonsense, of course! Valuev, in principle, could not intermarry with Tiye. At Maurice Tiye did not and could not have children. Unfortunately, his difficult appearance was not something natural, but only a product of the rarest disease - acromegaly, in which, in general, health suffers no less than beauty and psychological balance. Tiye has never been married, unlike his super-ego (this is not about Valuev anymore, no). His life is full internal conflict(he never managed to get used to himself in the mirror), could become an occasion for a novel, and not for procreation. Well, I almost did, if you take into account Shrek, the tales of which both children and adults loved. Although the story of the fabulous giant is not directly connected with Tiye. The life of our hero was not a fairy tale. And this novella has an unexpected moral - not everything that looks like a monster, roars like a monster, and smells like a monster, is actually a monster. There are exceptions in life.

Shrek was invented by the writer William Steig, a part-time cartoonist who for many years adorned the front pages of the most popular American publications with his drawings and replenished American literature with a bunch of children's books that no one in Russia ever thought of translating. Steig also became famous for being one of the top ten banned writers in the United States. In the late 70s, American society took up arms against the most innocent book "Sylvester and the Magic Crystal" - the biography of a smart donkey named Sylvester (nothing sacred!). The writer was framed by his own pig characters. The story was cursed by members of the association of police officers, who were offended by the caricature images of policemen in the form of pigs. The metaphor angered them. They got their way by casting the demons out of the libraries.

Shrek, on the other hand, was born much later, did not cross anyone's path, and it was a very small story, only about thirty pages, illustrated by the writer himself, a man of great and different talents. Shrek hit bookstore shelves in 1990. There was no epic, the scale is negligible. It was a tale about the adventures of a creature, in European mythology called an ogre - a cannibal giant. The story of how a young giant living in a swamp, frightening the surrounding people with his appearance, turns out to be so kind that he is simply unable to cause any harm, except for a frightening growl. In search of impressions, the giant Shrek goes on a journey that ends for him in his marriage to a beautiful princess, a giantess like himself. "Horror!" - this is how the name given by the writer to his character is translated from Yiddish. There is nothing strange in the fact that the writer chooses this word, familiar to him from childhood - this is how his own grandmother reacted to life collisions. Steig came from a Polish-Jewish émigré environment. He spent his childhood in Brooklyn. At the beginning of the last century, there was some Shrek at every turn.

But Shrek the Ogre, if he himself invented it, then at least he had an excellent reason for this. Shrek existed! It did not have to be invented at all, only described. And of course, long before the birth of the cartoon, Steig had already met his future literary child. Acquaintance with the prototype of the character named "Horror-horror" took place on the basis of love for the sport. Love is not to make, but to watch. Steig in his youth visited the favorite places of congestion of citizens - wrestling arenas. In those days when the ogre shone on them, he is also the French Angel, this is how Tiye was announced in different years. Wrestling - the type of competition in which he participated, most popular in America, only then became a corrupt spectacle, in which the circus component replaced the sport from beginning to end, in fact, not the struggle itself, but its imitation. In the old days, true competitiveness was still not alien to wrestling. Other times they fought seriously. And the rich and the poor alike went to stare at the fights, who had nothing to do, especially during the Great Depression, and for a long time after it, when there was nothing to do at all, even hang yourself. The passion of the sports world attracted and charged with adrenaline, making some of the impressions unforgettable. And the impressions of youth remain fresh for a long time. The future writer could not get the amazing wrestler out of his head - the invincible Maurice Tiye. By the way, in terms of age, Tiye and Steig were almost the same age. The writer was born in 1907 in New York. And Shrek, that is, of course, Tiye - in 1904 ... in the Urals. This curious fact of his biography was recently discovered by journalists who got to the bottom of the truth after Shrek's "mystery of birth" was revealed. In American magazines of the 1940s, there were interviews with Tiye, in which he told readers the details of his biography, now long forgotten. It turns out that he spent his childhood in St. Petersburg. Is it true? It is quite possible that it is not. The biography of Tiye - a long-forgotten wrestler - is full of gaps. After all, not everything that media people tell journalists is worth trusting. And seventy years ago everything was exactly the same - the stars lie, onlookers believe. Sometimes they lie disinterestedly. Is it worth explaining to the fans that you were born in the city of N, N-th district, Zaensky volost, if all these names do not tell their mind and heart anything. But Petersburg - yeah, a guy from Russia!

The guy from the Russian underworld

In fact, Maurice Tiye was born not in the capital, but in the Urals, where to this day there are settlements that remember French names and surnames. In the Urals, it was always good with the French. There is even a little village Paris there (they say that the Cossacks who settled in those parts on the way from the war of 1812 joked like that). And Tiye was not Russian at all - it is known for sure that his parents were of French origin. They were the same foreign specialists who were so adored in pre-revolutionary Russia, they were lovingly sent out from abroad - all these "miss", "monsieur" and "monsieur" - educators for children, companions for adults. Tiye's mother was a teacher. Obviously a governess. And his father is a railway engineer. By the way, Tiye carefully concealed information about his ancestors all his life, but not at all because he treated them worse than he should have. Vice versa.

Maurice Tiye was an angel. And it was not in vain that he was called that in the ring - the French Angel. As if to compensate for his appearance, he was adorned with the most beautiful and finest traits of character that can be found in a human being. He was kind, smart, gentle at heart, well educated, very cultured and inhumanly decent. Every mother dreams of such a loving son - caring was another of his commendable qualities. And he really did not want his poor mother to be bothered by journalists in connection with his sporting achievements or an amusing appearance. Maurice Tiye was ashamed of himself and intended to protect his family from his fame. True, his father died before the family left Russia and before the boy discovered that he was ill. Dad was lucky, he died without knowing that he had given birth to a farce ogre, Maurice thought so.

Mom "ogre" was born in Paris. Being a Frenchwoman in the Russian provinces is her personal hell, chosen voluntarily. Madame tried her best to become at least a little Russified. Going to Russia after Maurice's dad, who was traveling under a contract, she had no idea that she would have to fit into very frosty patterns. The young French were promised mountains of gold, but they forgot to tell about the Russian reality that will not leave the European indifferent, whether he be Voltaire or Theophile Gautier. Tiye's mother was never able to get used to roads paved with liquid clay, to kvass instead of coffee, to jam instead of marmalade, to pickles, to the absence of flea liquid in the pharmacy, to an empty powder box, and so on. You never know what a woman can not survive. In 1917, she noticed that she had absolutely nowhere, and most importantly, nothing to buy gloves for herself, picked herself up and left Russia with her minor son. On this, the Russian roots of Maurice Tiye were cut off forever. Except for one story, as it turned out later, tightly tied him to Russia. He once told this story at his leisure to one of his few close friends, fighting with him in checkers-giveaway. Or in chess - that's not the point.

Angel

Angel - so called little Maurice all the aunts who saw him. Mom also called him an angel. "Come here, little angel..." As a child, he really was a very pretty boy. It seems that only one of his photographs has been preserved, in which he is depicted in a sailor's jacket - you can immediately see good boy from a respectable family. In Russia, there was a steady fashion for sailor suits, worn by everyone, starting with the heir to the throne. It was in this sailor suit that he left Russia in the summer of 1917 forever. He remembered birch groves, monotonously, in the rhythm of a waltz, flickering through the window of the train in which his mother was taking him home, and roadside taverns in which travelers were forced to stop to satisfy their hunger. All these establishments were similar to each other, in each of them they bought "pi-ro-gi" with potatoes or cabbage, so as not to get poisoned, they bought the simplest dish that you can take with you, wrapped in a paper towel. In one of these establishments, having paid, leaving, the mother forgot her umbrella. After them they shouted to return, but the mother was in a hurry - the train was on the platform, she did not notice the call. An unfamiliar old woman, who happened to be in the hall, darted to catch up. Carrying a lost thing in her hands, in the bustle of departure, the old woman stuck her umbrella out the window, and the mother could not figure out why she was scratching and why she was knocking with an umbrella, what she was trying to scream with her toothless mouth - the most repulsive sight from which they could not take their eyes off to to figure out - the grandmother just returns the forgotten umbrella. Finally, we figured it out. The train was still at the station, and the mother sent Maurice to pick up the lost good - a good umbrella, even valuable, left thanks to the rain that had stopped pouring. The old woman obviously hoped for material compensation for her troubles. She held out the bone handle of the umbrella to the boy, but did not give it back, pulled it back towards her, as if hinting at what was required in return ... it would be nice ... But in the bustle of the station, the mother did not remember the tip. She forgot to give him change. As a result, Maurice stood on the platform like a sheep and foolishly pulled the umbrella towards him, while the old woman did not let go, muttering something and getting angry. Maurice looked at this poorly dressed old woman unable to hide emotions. He was seized by the squeamishness characteristic of youth in relation to extraneous old age. Maurice generally easily moved from one mood to another, often the opposite, he was embarrassed, the situation with the umbrella plunged him into alarming embarrassment. To his right, the train was already hissing, spitting on the tracks, the seconds ticking by, it seemed there would be no end to it. However, realizing that she would not achieve anything from a teenager, and, letting go of her umbrella, the old woman shouted to him offendedly (maybe he misunderstood her?): “Do you hate looking at me? You will be just like me, angel!" At that moment the train started with a crash of iron, and Maurice was forever left with an umbrella in his hand and the imprint of a toothless grin of a strange old woman in his eyes. At night, lying on a rocking bed, he tried this way and that to figure out what exactly she wanted to tell him - "You will be like me." Old, right? Her words were in his ears until the boy fell asleep. He didn't tell his mother anything. She was already so excited when the train jerked. Maurice forgot about the nasty old woman - road impressions at that time completely closed this episode from him. He remembered about it only a few years later, when ...

Paris, Reims, New York

The small family, consisting of mother and son, was very lucky that they managed to return to their homeland in time. Who knows what this difficult page in the history of Russia would have turned out for them. Having left the Urals, which never became their home, they first returned to Paris, and later settled in Reims, where any pharmacist has better wine bins than a Russian landowner. But their life did not become richer from this. The mother continued to teach, the son continued to study at the Catholic school where she taught. He was an amazingly capable child, this little Tiye. And although they were always in cramped circumstances, he studied, stubbornly achieving the best knowledge, intending to continue his education - Maurice was determined to become a lawyer. Alas, fate laughed at his dreams.

It all started with a bad jump at school. Maurice loved sports, differed among his peers with an excellent physique. He was broader in the shoulders than any of his peers. He considered people from aristocratic circles who put physical culture on the same level with intellectual development as an example for himself. Once, after intense sports, he noticed discomfort, which he associated only with excessive zeal in training. However, neither after a week nor after a month did the discomfort leave him - at first the limbs swelled, then he noticed with horror that his face began to swell.

At the age of seventeen, he first went to a doctor who was unable to help. They were still trying to treat him for arthritis, when it became clear that the joints were not a cause, but a consequence. And only two years later he was finally diagnosed with acromegaly. The disease struck him at the most dangerous age, when the body of a young man grows at the most intense speed. During these two years, while he could not understand what was happening to his unfortunate body, he suffered inexpressibly. He became afraid of mirrors. At night, it seemed to him that his bones were cracking, telescopically moving apart. In 70 years, the ogre cartoon will truly show how Prince Charming turns into Shrek and vice versa. That's just the young Maurice Tiye - the future French Angel - was not up to cartoons. After all, not Ducky-Duck, not Mickey Mouse, but he himself became huge before our eyes. As if an evil sorceress had put a curse on him: "When you reach the age of majority, you will become a monster."

At night, in the weak light of the moon, he examined his wrists, which by the age of 20 had become twice as wide as those of an ordinary person, and tried to understand ... he puzzled over why he suffered a cruel fate. Once he even remembered the "evil witch" with her curse. As if jumping out to him from the pages of a fairy tale: “You will become the same as me!” A terrible fairy tale overgrown with flesh before our eyes.

Acromegaly and nothing else! The doctor who broke the news to the young man had the open, good-natured face of a layman who had recently dined and intended to go to the club when he was done with the patient. This was already the tenth doctor to whom the mother took her child. The doctor told Maurice in detail why this happened to him, opened his eyes to the mechanism of "witchcraft". It turns out that the disease is caused by a benign tumor on the pituitary gland, as a result of which the human skeleton thickens, the bones of the patient begin to grow uncontrollably, especially in the cranial part. And no one can predict when this process will stop and whether it will stop at all. Acromegals grow all their lives, until the very moment when the disease overcomes them. How exactly? The doctor looked at his still so young patient, considering whether to tell him the unvarnished truth. After all, acromegals die before reaching the age of fifty, as if crushed by their own weight. More often than not, their hearts simply fail. Is it nice to live knowing what you're going to die of?

It can be said that Maurice was crushed by this very news. The doctor left him no hope, saying that modern medicine can offer nothing to the patient, except for "pill No. 7", which helps from everything. By the way, it remains almost in the same place today - the treatment of acromegaly, or gigantism, as it is also called, remains an inaccessible dream of physicians. And the best they can offer living acromegals is battery-powered pacemakers implanted inside the body. Batteries have to be changed every couple of years, cutting and resewing the skin, prolonging life. And they live, most often trying to hide from prying eyes. By the way, the most famous giant in the world is our former compatriot Leonid Stadnik, who lives in the Zhytomyr region in Ukraine. In fact, this is the tallest person on the planet today, whose height is 2 meters 53 centimeters, approximately, since for some time now the giant has sent lovers to climb him with a ruler from the Guinness Book of Records, who got into the habit of visiting Leonid with dreary regularity. So, since Stadnik, in the spirit of Shrek, closed the door in front of the representatives of the measuring commission, Guinness turned away from him, replacing the Chinese Bao Xishun, also quite tall and heavy, but, of course, not like ours. The stadnik is tied up with this farce - after all, not every giant has such a gentle character as our protagonist Tiye, who turned out to be one of the few who managed to turn the disease to his own advantage, well, as far as one can imagine the benefit of the disease that brings early death.

As already mentioned, the giant was of medium height. With a height of 170 cm and a weight of 122 kg. Maurice was not so much tall as broad and huge. The word "huge", by the way, has the same root as "ogre". The disease hit him with all its force, for some reason turning all in width, and not in length. The most terrible thing in this whole story was that a very young man had to give up all claims to human socialization. He dreamed of becoming a lawyer and for this purpose entered the university. He struggled to master the skills necessary to be accepted as an equal in this social niche. Without any financial support from the family, he was going to eventually get on his own feet. It is known that Maurice was an excellent mathematician and polyglot and was fluent in 14 foreign languages. And he was a sports aristocrat - playing rugby, polo, golf, but not aimlessly, but realizing that sports grounds provided a convenient field for friendship, for communication and establishing business relations in the world he was about to enter. For sporting success in rugby, the English king George V once shook his hand. But Faculty of Law At the University of Toulouse, Tiye had to leave due to illness. Legal practice is unthinkable without respectability.

Advocacy, in which he succeeded so well at the faculty, could not become his life. If someone thinks that the main tool of a lawyer is his brain, then this is a mistake. Voice! This is what a lawyer does when speaking in court. Tiye lost the main thing with which he had to earn his living - his voice. The disease affected the vocal cords. Twenty years after the collapse of his ambitions, in an interview with one of the New York newspapers, he will say: "Maybe with such a face I could become a lawyer, but my voice, like a donkey's roar, is simply impossible to listen to." He also tried to change something, drank some powders, gargled his throat, practiced oratorical exercises, but every day he understood more and more clearly: he would never become eloquent. The legal profession went through the woods. Where was the youngest giant to go?

He served in the French army for about five years, but left armed forces due to some personal circumstances, returning home. However, civilian clothes suddenly turned out to be too tall for him. He did not yet know that society does not so easily let in people who are not like anyone else. And he began a long series of ordeals, trying to find a job. He worked as a loader, and a librarian, and a stage fitter in the theater, and even sold drugs in a pharmacy, trying to be closer to saving medicine. And from everywhere he was sooner or later asked to get out, because there is no such place in society where nervous people, frightened faces and voices of an ogre - a man who looks more like an evil cannibal than your kind uncle. He was kicked out of the pharmacy after the case of a little girl who squealed incessantly for half an hour, fell into a nervous stammer after meeting Maurice. He managed to emerge from under the counter, under which he was tying his shoelace. By the age of thirty, he had come to terms with the fact that the first reaction to meeting him was almost always “Oh!”.

Tillet met the winter of 1937 in the foyer of the cinema. There he stood, dressed up as Frankenstein - huge, embarrassed, naked, in some rags on a hairy torso, in makeup and a wig. The suit on him looked perky, even partly compensated for his true ugliness, since it was not clear where the makeup was and where the real disgrace was. He checked the tickets, earning his fair and hard-earned money, enough to live on. In the form of a medieval freak, he caught stowaways. It was there that he was seen by a man named Carl Pogello, a professional wrestler who came to watch a pre-war comedy. He stood for a long time, admiring the unexpected sight, after which he approached Maurice to introduce himself. And on the same evening, fate presented Tiya with its completely new, friendly interface.

The new comrades sat down in a cafe, where, over a mug of beer, Pogello opened the brightest prospects for Tiya. Pogello convinced him to take up a previously untried profession. All the excuses that, they say, he has already tried everything, failed everywhere, that, standing at the checkout, he earns his hard pennies and does not intend to quit the job he found with such difficulty, from where he is not driven for appearance, he brushed aside with one sentence: “Sixty? ?? I offer you a thousand!” Tiye agreed. After all, he was still quite a young man, no stranger to adventurism. The next morning, new friends left for Paris, and a week later they started training. Maurice was thirty years old at the time. For the career of a novice athlete, he was, to put it mildly, a bit old. But this did not stop his newly-minted producer - in Frankenstein, he saw something delicious, like a golden cigarette case in a spittoon. Maurice could only suppress in himself the heavy thoughts that he was willingly becoming a farce scarecrow. After all, wrestling has always been a circus. It was then that he once and for all cut off all talk about his mother - he did not want to connect her with himself, a voluntary comprachikos of the ring.

Two years later, England and France already knew the new wrestler very well. And only the second World War he was prevented from gaining world fame in Europe by defeating all life there. Wars do not contribute to the development of interest in sports spectacles. He had to move to the USA. Maurice trained hard, making up for the skills he was deprived of, and did not pass even three years how he managed to win the world title in wrestling. This happened shortly after he became a full citizen of America - received citizenship. However, the world championship was then awarded for a great life in any city where the wrestling arena was just going. For a year and a half in a row, Tiye went on a tour of America, confirming his fame as invincible and truly terrible.

His career developed rapidly. During the Second World War, in Boston (Massachusetts), promoter Paul Bowser introduced Tiye to the noblest public under the pseudonym French Angel as his own discovery, a superstar. By this point, Tiye had already mastered all the rules of the game, in which he had to maintain his image of an evil and treacherous fellow, capable of biting off both ears to someone, including his head to the waist, without batting an eyelid. He growled, spat, uttered an inhuman howl, hitherto unheard of from anyone in the ring, he behaved like a real fairytale ogre. Or like Shrek, when he wants to scare people. Crowds went to look at Tiye. In the spring of 1940, he won the Boston World Championship and held his undefeated title for two years in a row, after which he did the same to all opponents in Montreal. As a result, Tiye had imitative howlers who took on his angel moniker as well, only with modifications like the Swedish Angel or the Berlin Angel. These he brought down with one left.

Alas, the fairy ogres do not survive a collision with real life. Tiya's sports career was not destined to last long. A few years after the victorious march across America, he fell ill with migraines that had piled on him. He stopped sleeping - he was tormented by nightmares. Carl Pajello, his only closest friend, listened more than once to complaints about dreams, during which the poor fellow saw more and more new transformations of his body. Then one day, right in the ring, he suddenly stopped seeing. Vision returned after the rest, but it became clear that further participation in sports life was impossible. And although he still continued to entertain the audience from time to time with his cannibalistic jokes, roars and aggressive attacks, entering the ring, but it was already more of a window dressing than a serious claim to victory. That's when he really became a farce ogre. IN last time he entered the ring in 1953 in Singapore, losing a fight to the then no less famous wrestler Bert Assirati.

And so he would have sunk into oblivion, this “cannibal of the arena”, if not for the Chicago sculptor Louis Link, who was so interested in Tiye’s appearance that he stuck busts from him. The survivors of them are preserved in history. For example, one is kept in the Chicago International Museum of Scientific Surgery as a reminder of the game of nature, which once laughed at a good person. The sculptor Link managed to convey in his works not only the famous ugliness of Tiye, but also his kindness, his charm and softness, hidden in the folds of his huge face - Tiye's head, on average, was three times larger than a normal, human one. He was the spitting image of a giant from a medieval epic.

He died, as predicted by the good doctor, barely reaching the age of fifty, from a heart attack that overtook him after the news of the death of his dearest friend - that same Carl Pajello, who made him a wrestler, a "cannibal giant" and a French Angel. And he was reborn to life in the form of a funny and touching Shrek - more than half a century after his death. By the way, the DreamWorks studio, which once introduced its charming Shrek to the world, carefully hides the origin of the character. Apparently, so that it would not be habitual for the heirs, if such were found, to profit from a good memory.

Tiye did not leave an inheritance, only the memory of himself - a short story about how the most deplorable circumstances are subject to the strength of the human spirit. The friendly memory of Maurice Tiye remained only the kindest. Those few people whom he called friends (who could be sure that they did not love him for his beauty) managed to tell only the most beautiful and even romantic about him. He loved life, did not consider it cruel, on the contrary, he attributed the property of “exclusivity” to his fate and was pleased with this. And he loved his friends without exaggeration to death. Carl Pajello, best friend and promoter of Maurice Tiye, died of cancer in 1954, on the same day, September 4, our hero also died of a heart attack. The good doctor's prediction of "a maximum of fifty years, my dear" has come true. The heart of the fifty-year-old "ogre" could not stand the loss of a friend. “Death cannot separate friends” is written on the tombstone of their common grave, which today is often shown to the curious as “Shrek’s grave”. This is how a good, but ugly man became a terrible, but very attractive giant. Truly, in great ugliness, as in great beauty, there is something magical that forever attracts people.

(c) Olga Filatova

It may seem bad joke or farce, but this incredible story is historically accurate and true! The prototype of the cartoon Shrek was the famous wrestler Maurice Tiye. He was born in 1903 in Russia, in the Urals, into a French family, which in 1917 returned to France in connection with the revolution.

As a child, Maurice outwardly did not differ from his peers, rather the opposite - he was called "Angel", thanks to his pretty features. But everything changed at the age of seventeen, when the rare disease acromegaly began to progress in him, causing a monstrous, disproportionate increase in bones, especially the facial ones.

In connection with these terrible external transformations, Maurice had to abandon the desired career as a lawyer. But he did not put an end to his life, but decided to use his disadvantage as a huge advantage! Maurice went to the United States to become a professional wrestler, and in May 1940 he became the champion of the American Wrestling Association, holding this title for the next 19 months. He was known by the nickname "terrible ogre of the ring", but in the future he was called, as in childhood, "French angel", due to his sincerity and kind character.

It is also worth noting that Maurice Tillet was distinguished by phenomenal intellectual abilities, which many did not even know about. He was fluent in 14 languages, wrote wonderful stories and poems.

Unfortunately, his illness progressed, and at the age of 51, Maurice died of a heart attack. But all of it is short-lived, but bright life is a wonderful example of human courage and bravery. Instead of complaining that life had only "sour lemons" at his disposal, he deftly learned how to make "lemonade" out of them and enjoy his life. I am sure that Maurice would really like his cartoon prototype Shrek, who, like him, is kind and sensitive, despite his intimidating appearance.

Maurice Tiye. Animated Shrek prototype

It may seem like a cruel joke or a farce, but this incredible story is historically accurate and true! The prototype of the cartoon Shrek was a famous wrestler Maurice Tiye. He was born in 1903 in Russia, in the Urals, into a French family, which in 1917 returned to France in connection with the revolution.

Maurice Tiye(fr. Maurice Tillet listen)) (October 23, 1903 - September 4, 1954) was a French professional wrestler, born in Russia, also known by the pseudonym "French Angel". In the early 1940s, Tiye was one of the most popular wrestlers among the audience, and was twice recognized as world heavyweight champion by the Boston American Wrestling Association, which was led by Paul Bowser.

Maurice Tiye was born in the Urals to a French family. His mother was a teacher and his father was a railroad engineer. Tiye's father died when he was young. As a child, he had a completely normal appearance and was nicknamed "Angel" because of his angelic face. In 1917, Tillet and his mother left Russia due to the revolution and moved to France, settling in Reims. When Tiye was seventeen, he noticed swelling in his feet, hands, and head, and at age 19, he was diagnosed with acromegaly, a disease caused by a benign tumor on the pituitary gland, as a result of which a person's bones grow and thicken, especially in the facial part. With a height of 170 cm, the weight of Maurice Tillet was 122 kg.

In his youth, Maurice was a successful rugby player and in 1926 even received a handshake from King George V of England himself for success in sports. He entered Talouse University in France to study law, but after a while the disease began to progress and greatly affected his vocal cords. Due to illness, plans for a legal career had to be abandoned.

“Maybe with a face like that, I could have become a lawyer, but my voice, like a donkey, is simply impossible to listen to, so I went to the Navy,” Tiye said in an interview with the Lowell Sun Newspaper, Lowell Mass. U.S.A, April 8, 1943.

Tillet served five years in the French Navy as an engineer.

Maurice Tillet was a very devout Catholic in 1947, he was granted an audience by the Pope, and was the only wrestler in history who had such an honor. Largely thanks to the mother, who taught all her life foreign languages at the Catholic school, where Maurice also went, by mid-1942 Tiye was fluent in Russian, French, Bulgarian, English and Lithuanian. According to some reports, he learned about 14 languages ​​in his entire life.

Maurice mentioned several times that he spent his childhood in St. Petersburg. Presumably, he did this only because it was easier for Americans to understand where he came from and where he spent most of his childhood. Carl Pogello once said that while Maurice's father was alive, he often went on business trips on duty, and his family traveled with him, which is probably why Tiye spent a lot of time in St. Petersburg.

Tiye treated his appearance philosophically and with humor. In his youth, it was much more difficult for him to adapt in society, but with age he understood how to turn his shortcomings into advantages.

“Peers called me a monkey, and I was very upset. Who will like this? To hide from ridicule, I often went to the pier and that's it. free time spent near the water. The people who lived there were completely indifferent to how I looked,” wrote Look Magazine on April 25, 1950.

Once he even posed for a paleontolic museum next to exhibits of Neanderthals, the resemblance to which he was very amused.

In February 1937, Tiye met Carl Pogello in Singapore. Pogello was a professional wrestler and he convinced Tiye to do the same. Tiye and Pogello moved to Paris to train. Tiye spent two years fighting in France and England, after which in 1939 he was forced to leave for the United States due to the Second World War.

In 1940, in Boston, Massachusetts, promoter Paul Bowser promoted Tiye, who went by the pseudonym "French Angel", as the main star. It ended up attracting huge crowds in the region. As a result of his popularity, Tiye was given the role of "invincible" in which he went undefeated for 19 consecutive months. In May 1940, Tiye won the Boston version of the World Heavyweight Championship, holding the title until May 1942. In early 1942, he was also the heavyweight champion of the Montreal variation of the World Championship. In 1944, he regained the Boston title for a short time.

By 1945, Tiye's health began to deteriorate, and he no longer played the role of "invincible", constant headaches, excessive fatigue, weakening of vision and - these are just a few that are characteristic of acromegaly, and, of course, professional wrestling has made its own adjustments. Maurice has serious heart problems. In his last match, held February 14, 1953 in Singapore, he lost to Bert Assirati. In 1950, Chicago sculptor Louis Link befriended Tiye and created a series of plaster busts as a reminder of his wrestling career. One of the busts is kept in Chicago's International Museum of Scientific Surgery.

Another bust called "Angel" is on display at the York Barbell Museum. Two other busts were kept in a private collection, but in 2006 they were donated to the museum.

Carl Pajello, best friend and promoter of Maurice Tiye, died of cancer on September 4, 1954, on the same day, September 4, 1954, Tiye died of a heart attack, unable to survive the loss of a close comrade.

A monument was erected on their common grave: "And death is not able to separate friends." They are both buried at the Lithuanian National Cemetery in Justice, Cook County, Illinois, twenty miles from Chicago.

Having released several parts of the animated picture "Shrek", the DreamWorks film studio, for some reason, hid the fact that the prototype of the green swamp giant was was a real person. One glance at the photo of wrestler Maurice Tillet is enough to understand that it was he who inspired the artists when working on the image of the main character.

Maurice Tiye was born in Russia, near Chelyabinsk, in 1903. The French family ended up in the South Urals not by chance - Maurice's father worked under a contract as an engineer on the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The boy's mother taught the children of railway workers French, which was in great demand at that time.

Maurice's father died very early, and his mother had to take care of the boy's upbringing herself. It was probably thanks to the efforts of his mother that Tiye mastered languages ​​on the fly and, in adulthood, in addition to French and Russian, he could speak English and German fluently.

After the October Revolution, mother and son returned to France, where Maurice graduated from a prestigious college in Reims and entered the university. The beginning of student life in young Tiye coincided with a deterioration in health - Maurice was diagnosed with acromegaly (a severe disorder of the neuroendocrine system caused by hypersecretion of the so-called growth hormone).

The disease, in which excessive bone growth occurs, did not prevent the young man from studying and even playing rugby professionally in the university team. But, unfortunately, due to a change in appearance, the career of a lawyer, which the young man dreamed of, had to be forgotten.

When the appearance of Maurice changed beyond recognition, he left his studies with regret and began to look for a place in life where actions are important, not appearance. The way out for Tiye was to serve in the navy - a young man got a job as a mechanic on a warship, on which he spent the next five years of his life.

It was in the navy that Maurice Tiye became interested in wrestling - during long sea passages, the team supported physical form this particular sport. During his wanderings around the world, the man came to terms with his appearance and even began to treat her with a certain amount of humor. Therefore, when, after being discharged from the Navy, Tiye received an invitation to try his hand at cinema, he happily agreed.

With his data, Maurice had the opportunity to act only in comic films, and playing secondary roles. After filming a dozen not too intellectual films, Tiye realized the futility of such a career and moved to the protection of the film studio.

Most likely, the man would have worked until the end of his life as a watchman, guarding the shooting props, if not for the fateful meeting with Carl Pogello, a professional wrestler. Karl, or rather Karolis Pozhela, was born and raised in Lithuania, but his wrestling career gave him the opportunity to travel around the world. Pogello performed in Europe, North and South America, in China and Japan. At the time of the meeting with Tiye, the athlete had already completed his career and was engaged in coaching and producing activities.

Karl saw Maurice on one of the French boulevards - it was hard not to notice the young giant in the crowd. Pogello immediately realized that in front of him was a real wrestling diamond, which only needed to be given a decent cut.

The young Frenchman had everything he needed to succeed with the audience of sports shows: physical strength, unusual appearance, charm and, most importantly, acting experience. Maurice, after some hesitation, agreed to try his hand at wrestling - apart from a wobbly chair in the watchman's booth, he had nothing to lose.

Under the guidance of an experienced Pogello, Tiye quickly began to make progress in wrestling. Karl was involved in creating the image of an athlete, staging stunts, developing training programs and signing contracts around the world. Maurice was an obedient student and, as it turned out, a talented wrestler, so the couple's affairs quickly went uphill.

A charismatic wrestler with an unusual appearance quickly became a favorite of the audience. Tillet was a resounding success in Europe, and then became one of the favorites of the public in the United States. Thanks to this, Maurice managed to obtain American citizenship without any problems. In the USA, the wrestler became known as the French Angel, and his signature move was "bear capture", from which the opponent could not escape.

Tillet's career in wrestling lasted twenty long years, during which Maurice repeatedly became the champion. But, despite the harsh profession, in his heart the man remained the same. The athlete was a deeply religious person, and his responsiveness to other people's misfortunes was legendary. The athlete held many charity shows, the funds from which were transferred to orphans and hospitals, while Karl supported the ward in all his affairs.

Over the years of working together, Tie and Pogello became close friends, and Maurice was practically a member of his coach's family. Coincidentally, the wrestler and his mentor began to have health problems almost simultaneously - Karl was diagnosed with lung cancer, and Maurice began to exacerbate chronic diseases associated with acromegaly. Pogello died on September 4, 1954, and his friend Tiye - just a few hours after receiving the sad news, from a heart attack.

It was decided not to separate friends after death, so Carl and Maurice were buried in the same grave at the Lithuanian cemetery in Justice, Cook County, Illinois. A short but capacious epitaph is carved on their common tombstone: "And death is not able to separate friends."

A wonderful athlete and a wonderful person is gone, but the hero, created by the DreamWorks animators, helped replicate his image around the world in millions of toys and images. Every time you see the green good-natured Shrek, remember the glorious Maurice Tiye - he undoubtedly deserved it.