He moved to the States in 1968 after winning his first Mr Universe title. He struggled for the first couple of years, working as a bricklayer, but was soon making dollars selling mail-order fitness books. He invested the money from that in property, eventually owning 'hundreds and hundreds' of flats in Los Angeles. Schwarzenegger was already a rich man before he became Arnie.Pumping Iron, the 1977 documentary about his successful bid for his sixth Mr Universe championship, made Hollywood sit up and take notice. He was cast as an oiled-up super-hunk in films like Conan the Barbarian, but it wasn't really until The Terminator in 1984, which nobody expected to be a hit, that he became more than a Hollywood sideshow act. 'Terminator 1 changed my entire career,' he says. 'Because it was the first movie that I did that really I was not relying on the body that much, like Conan or Stay Hungry, so it was the first time I did a movie where people saw that it was not the body that is the most important thing: it is the way he acts, his voice, his style, that is what is becoming a real sellable thing.'
But it's 12 years since Terminator 2 and a lot has changed. He will be 56 at the end of July. In the interim he's had serious health problems, and in 1997 had valve replacement surgery; he now has a pig's heart valve keeping that huge body alive.
And although he says he keeps himself very fit - he still works out morning and night - shooting Terminator 3 was very tough on him. His body is obviously creakier than it was more than a decade ago: he walks a little stiffly - he has slight arthritis in one hip - and in January he had surgery on his left shoulder, which he had injured while making the film. That meant he was unable to exercise as fully as he likes: photos from a recent holiday in St Barts showed him podgy and out of condition. But he deflects suggestions that his body is not up to it any more. 'The only restrictions I see is that your body is not as forgiving as when you are 30 years old,' he says. 'You have to be more careful and the muscles don't recuperate as fast, but I can do the same stunts. As a matter of fact, I like to do the same stunts, because it makes me feel as if I'm 30 years old.'
He is also aware of the doubts in Hollywood that the young audiences that should be the biggest market for Terminator 3 will accept a 56-year-old man as an action hero, even such an iconic figure as Schwarzenegger. 'If people like what they see, if they think what they see looks the same as 10 years ago, then that won't happen,' is his response to suggestions that younger audiences may stay away. 'But if they feel I'm limping along like an old man, then they will say, 'He's over the hill; I don't think he will get another action movie.''
Early reviews suggest that Schwarzenegger has pulled off a remarkable career resurrection. Although Terminator 3 is competing against an unprecedented array of youth-oriented summer action movies - including Hulk, Charlie's Angels 2, The Matrix Reloaded, X-Men 2 and Tomb Raider 2 - and although Terminator 3 is the first in the series not to be directed by James Cameron, reviewers have enjoyed the film's wit and unrepentant metal-crunching mayhem. The sequel has 'B-movie spirit - swift, punchy, tongue often in cheek', writes Newsweek's David Ansen. 'Arnold's good-guy cyborg has become even more a figure of fun than last time.'
Schwarzenegger would obviously have preferred to make Terminator 3 some years ago. You can almost see him counting the money he may have lost because of the delays: he can instantly tell you that the box-office gross of Terminator 2 was $514m in the US and $310m in the rest of the world. But the rights got snarled up in the bankruptcy of the movie company Carolco. At one time he was so eager to get the film going, he suggested he and Cameron should buy the rights for $20m, until Cameron talked him out of it.
Terminator 3 is very important to Schwarzenegger for another reason: the $30m pay cheque. The film has once again made him the best-paid movie star in the world and nothing gives him greater satisfaction. 'I love my pay cheque,' he says. 'It is so much fun to get that money and it's without any guilt. No guilt. Because those guys - the studios - have so much money, sometimes they lose hundreds of millions of dollars like this' - he snaps his fingers - 'in one day on the stock market, or when they make a merger like AOL Time Warner. Bang! So when you talk about my thing, it's Mickey Mouse stuff.'The money is going to come in useful. He may be a very rich man but he's going to need every last cent when he does run for governor. California politics is more expensive than rebuilding Iraq. The Democrat incumbent, Gray Davis, spent $35m on his winning campaign in 1998. He spent over $76m to win in 2002, the most ever spent on a state office race in the US. So Schwarzenegger must be reckoning he's going to need as much as $150m. Most of it won't be his, of course, but no wonder he has just put his Pacific Palisades estate on the market for $18m. But he'll surely be fine in his $12m, five-bedroom, 11-bathroom home in LA's Brentwood district.
For the past couple of years, Schwarzenegger, who has a team of top Republican advisers on his payroll, has been very carefully plotting his political moves towards a race for governor in 2006. As a first step, at the last election he sponsored, heavily promoted and backed by more than $1m of his own money the After School Education and Safety Program Act of 2002. The act, which easily passed with the actor's name recognition, provides substantially more funds for after-school programmes for children. He now wants to expand the programme nationwide.
But all his political planning has been thrown for a loop in recent weeks. Governor Davis is now so unpopular that he faces an unprecedented campaign. If his opponents can gather just under 900,000 signatures, and they're already nearly halfway there, that would force an early election, probably in March 2004. 'The leading candidate will be somebody like a Schwarzenegger,' says Bruce Cain, professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley - although, of course, there is nobody 'like a Schwarzenegger'. For Republicans, Cain adds, 'the one hope is a personable, charismatic guy with money, who is hard to pin down on the issues. That's the ideal formula and that describes Arnold Schwarzenegger, for sure'.
But Schwarzenegger hadn't been planning to run so soon and, anyway, most astute observers see winning an early election as a poisoned chalice. The main reason Gray Davis is so unpopular is California's huge budget deficit. That deficit and the enormous problems it brings with it would be inherited by whoever - Schwarzenegger? - won an early election.
And there's another wrinkle. Although Schwarzenegger has been getting informal backing from Karl Rove, Bush's longtime political adviser, who is desperate to bring heavily Democratic California back into the Republican camp, there has been talk that Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, has been seriously contemplating a run for California governor in 2006. And as Ron Brownstein, political commentator for the Los Angeles Times, pointed out recently, 'A run by Rice, an African American, would greatly advance Bush's goal of presenting a more diverse face for the Republican party. But a Rice candidacy would likely be precluded if another Republican wins the governorship in a recall election.' And everyone is clear whom Brownstein means by 'another Republican'.
Polls suggest Schwarzenegger is very popular with voters, but he is still no shoo-in. He has never had to undergo the kind of vicious political campaign that is de rigueur in California. As soon as he declares he's in the race, Democrats will surely rifle through every inch of the baggage he is carrying from 25 years as a Hollywood celebrity.
