Hailing from White Bear Lake, Minnesota, Molly Holly is next up on our list of the greatest women wrestlers of all-time. Molly Holly, born Nora Kristina Greenwald, despite standing at only 5'4 was a suplex specialist. During her time as a pro-wrestler, there wasn't an opponent she didn't fear lifting off the ground and hurling over her shoulders. Holly was also quite the athlete performing moves like the Rolling Neck Snap, Sunset Flip Powerbomb, and Handspring Back Splash regularly in the ring. Also, her finishing move, the Molly Go Round takes an exquisite amount of precision to execute on a weekly basis.
As a youth, Molly Holly never thought that she would become a pro-wrestler with her aspirations set on becoming an American Gladiator. However, as a teen, she began powerlifting and eventually found herself working for the WCW as a trainer and eventually as a wrestling personality herself. From 1998-2005, Holly worked for both the WCW and the WWF where she captured the WWF Women's Championship (2x) and the WWF Hardcore Championship for an hour before losing it to Christian at WrestleMania X8. Since then, Molly Holly has popped in and out of the independent circuit and the WWE over the past decade.
Celebrities are no strangers to changing their looks for a role. And in some instances, they have to get pretty extreme. From 500-calorie-a-day diets to drinking pints of ice cream, Actors and actresses know what it takes to change their bodies in preparation for a new film.
Charlize Theron is no stranger to gaining and losing weight for movie roles, as we remember her transformation in Monster. Charlize Theron gained close to 50 pounds for her role as Marlo in Tully. Theron said that “for the first time in my life I was eating so much processed foods and I drank way too much sugar. … I remember having to set my alarm in the middle of the night in order to just maintain the weight.”
You’re used Chris Hemsworth's hulk-like figure in Thor, but In the Heart of the Sea required a totally different diet. The movie required the cast members lose a ton of weight to make their stuck-at-sea plight more believable. Chris Hemsworth said there were days when all he ate was one boiled egg, a couple of crackers, and a celery stick.
Anne Hathaway wanted to get serious for her role in Les Misérables, as she was playing Fantine, a starving prostitute with tuberculosis. So Anne Hathaway went on a diet of “rabbit food” to drop 25 pounds. Hathaway explained her diet was essentially just starving herself, but she didn’t want to give details, as she doesn’t want to encourage anyone to copy her emaciated look. She did note that she “just had to stop eating for a total of 13 days shooting,” however. And at one point, her bones became so frail that she reportedly broke her arm.
Matthew McConaughey's portrayal of Ron Woodruff in Dallas Buyers Club, a man with HIV/AIDS, was spot-on, earning him the title of best actor at the Oscars. But it also required a serious physical transformation. Matthew McConaughey said he lost 38 pounds for the role. During filming, he said he lost a lot of energy from eating so little — and he hit plenty of plateaus along the way. Finally, with a strict diet, he got down to 143 pounds. And while he did cardio to help with the weight loss, he said it was 90% what he was eating and portion size.
Hilary Swank had to put on 23 pounds of pure muscle for her role as a boxer in Million Dollar Baby. The process doesn’t sound easy, however. “I started working out five hours a day — I had to eat 210 grams of protein a day,” Swank said. She also mentioned that she had to consume 60 egg whites per day, and when that proved too difficult, she had to drink them. And to keep the muscle on, she would get up and drink protein shakes in the middle of the night.