Hollywood action star Arnold Schwarzenegger is in a stable condition after undergoing emergency open-heart surgery, celebrity news website TMZ reported yesterday.
The 70-year-old actor turned activist – popularly known as “Arnie” – was in a Los Angeles hospital on Thursday to have a pulmonic valve replaced and developed complications, the gossip portal said, citing unnamed Schwarzenegger sources.
Doctors rushed the Terminator and Predator star into the operating theatre for open-heart surgery, operating for several hours, TMZ said.
The original replacement pulmonic valve, which Schwarzenegger received in 1997, outlasted its life expectancy, so the former California governor chose to have valve replacement by catheter, spokesman Daniel Ketchell said in a statement on Twitter.
He was recovering and in stable condition at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, the statement said.
Schwarzenegger “is awake and his first words were actually ‘I’m back’”, Ketchell said.
Schwarzenegger’s character famously says “I’ll be back” in his breakthrough role in the 1984 movie The Terminator.
Born in Austria, Schwarzenegger won the Mr Universe bodybuilding contest five times and Mr Olympia seven times before turning to acting, starring in action movies such as Conan the Barbarian and Commando.
He then went into politics, and was elected governor of California as a Republican in 2003 and 2006.
Schwarzenegger underwent non-urgent heart surgery 21 years ago to have an aortic valve replaced, due to a condition that he said was congenital and nothing to do with steroids.
He revealed in his book Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story that he initially kept that first operation a secret from his wife, Maria Shriver, by telling her he was on vacation in Mexico.
In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, he said that his doctor told him he was “crazy” when he said he planned to keep the operation quiet from Shriver.
“He said ‘your wife is pregnant, what do you mean you are not going to tell her?’” Schwarzenegger recalled.
“I told him: ‘Here is the plan, I am going to have the heart surgery, you do it quietly, no one knows about it, we do it at six in the morning. Four days later I am out of here and I go to Mexico and I will tell Maria I am down here, a little busy and I am on vacation, when I come back I’ll be tanned and no one will know’.”
The Austrian-born former bodybuilder was voted in as governor of California in a historic 2003 recall vote – but proved the win was no fluke by routing opponent Phil Angelides to get re-elected.