Mildred Burke put women’s wrestling on the map and became the first woman athlete to make a million. Yet she’s virtually unknown.
With “Queen of the Ring,” a warts and all biopic in theaters Friday, Emily Bett Rickards hopes to change that.
“Before I had the job (playing Mildred), I was diving into her life and wondered why I had never heard about her,” Rickards began in a Zoom interview.
“She changed history for women. She was feminine and strong in a time when that wasn’t in vogue. To me she was extraordinary, and I felt that not knowing who she was, was a disservice to myself. Hopefully, we can share her story with the world.”
Burke and her manager-husband Bill Wolfe (Josh Lucas) were pioneers, beginning in the 1930s Great Depression.
“The cards were stacked against her the whole time she was wrestling,” noted Rickards, 33 and best known for the DC superhero series “Arrow.”
“It was not only illegal for women to wrestle each other, it was illegal for women to wrestle. Period. Women were looked down on to even go see wrestling.
“She’d been waitressing — her mom owned a diner. There wasn’t a lot of business and she was looking for a way out.
“Then she saw these shows with hundreds of men and she said, ‘I want to do that.’
“There was no reason she should have this dream of becoming a wrestler. She had never wrestled herself. She had never seen other women wrestle.
“She was putting on muscle in a time when women really weren’t at the gym. There were no muscular women around at all. She just had this kind of crazy belief, that this is what she was going to do.
“She really believed that she could tell a story, that you would be entertained and that you would come and pay money to see her do this thing that she so badly wanted to express.
“And she wasn’t going to take ‘No’ for an answer.”
When she began the wrestling wasn’t scripted, it was real. “They were called shoot matches where people fought for real. And it was only men that could wrestle her, because women’s wrestling was illegal. So she would beat these men and they would bet money.
“Then, when it became scripted, that’s when they really started making their own money.
“She ended up bringing thousands of people together with other women that she wrestled. This was whilst women’s wrestling was still illegal in most states.
“She was breaking walls down in this country and then across the world.”
Burke was 73 when she died in 1989.
“Queen of the Ring” opens Friday