After appearing as a tough guy in 11 James Bond films, the stuntman Doug Robinson admitted that as a young man he wanted to be a ballet dancer.
Robinson was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1930, the son of a champion wrestler, but it was a few decades too early for a Billy Elliot-style narrative to play out. His father taught him to wrestle and he went on to run a gym in Old Compton Street in Soho, London, to train actors, including Sean Connery, how to do fight scenes without hurting themselves.
That connection led to his first Bond stunt role in You Only Live Twice (1967). While he was shooting a scene with a fellow stuntman, Vic Armstrong, in which they abseil into Blofeld’s mountain lair, the assistant director shouted “cut” and Robinson felt a sudden sharp pain in his backside while suspended on the set. “We were hanging from ropes that were dangling from the ceiling and the assistant director had come across a problem so we were waiting around for quite some time,” he recalled. “Vic was behind me and his finger must have slipped onto the trigger. Sure enough his gun went off. Bloody good job we were using blanks.”
With his mad staring eyes and mobile face, Robinson cut an excellent figure as a fleeting villain and his prowess as a judoka proved particularly useful when filming action sequences.
In a climactic scene in Where Eagles Dare (1968), Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood spray machinegun bullets from the back of a bus on the way to an airfield to make their escape. Robinson plays a German soldier pursuing them on a motorcycle and he rides into a fence, flies over the handlebars, performs a forward roll and lands neatly on his back in the snow.
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He expertly falls down a spiral staircase after Roger Moore blasts him with a shotgun during a scene in the 1985 Bond film A View to a Kill. “The producer said, ‘That was the best stair fall I’ve ever seen.’ The truth is I slipped and pretty much actually fell down the stairs,” Robinson recalled. Having got his first big stunt film role on Ben-Hur (1959), Robinson was still performing into his sixties on films such as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991).
Douglas Bowbank Robinson was one of eight children born to Stella (née Hurle) and Joseph Robinson. The family emigrated to South Africa, where his father found work teaching judo to the police; he also taught a young hairdresser and aspiring actor called Sid James. Robinson attended school there during the Second World War and studied mining engineering, but he and his brother Joe were already set on becoming actors. Both took elocution lessons to lose their Geordie-tinted South African accents. Doug became a tap dancing champion in South Africa.
He followed his brother to London, where Joe trained at Rada. The Robinson brothers opened their gym in Old Compton Street and began to regularly hang out at a café in nearby Gerrard Street that became a de facto casting hub for actors, stuntmen and starlets. “It was a great pulling place actually,” Robinson recalled.
In 1961 he and Joe were asked to help teach the actress Honor Blackman judo for her role in The Avengers. They would go on to help her to write Honor Blackman’s Book of Self-Defence (1965) and modelled for the book, being thrown about by the glamorous blonde actress while she held a handbag in her other arm.
Once established, he worked on many big budget films including Jason and the Argonauts, A Bridge Too Far, The Empire Strikes Back, the Superman films and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, in which he played a double bass in one of the opening scenes and then had it smashed over his head. Robinson, who was also a bodybuilder, did not believe in rabbit punches and often told the actors he worked with to hit him for real. On the 1985 film Enemy Mine Dennis Quaid took him at his word when Robinson told him to hit him in the stomach as hard as he could. “He caught me right in the corner of the ribs and nearly broke them,” Robinson recalled with a wince.
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Robinson’s private life was complicated. He was married four times, to Ulrica Thielke, Shirley Kemp, Jennifer Sanders and Stephanie Bemister. All the marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by a son and two daughters from his fourth marriage.
Having dived out of moving vehicles, jumped into water from 100m high and been thrown through walls, Robinson earned the respect, not to say fear, of actors on set. He once walked in on Norman Wisdom trying to take advantage of a scared young actress. A hard stare from Robinson was enough for Wisdom to desist.
Doug Robinson, stuntman, was born on February 8, 1930. He died on December 16, 2021, aged 91