Taken from The Metro, of all places…
Is it true you were a stuntman as well?
I didn’t intend to become a stuntman. The first feature that I had a real job on was Kelly’s Heroes, shot in 1969 in the former Yugoslavia, when the Iron Curtain really meant something. I’ve never forgotten it – landing there was like going from colour to black and white. That was at the height of the spaghetti western boom so I drove to Almeria in Spain where there was a tremendous amount of production going on. I was there for a year and worked on more than 50 movies. Most of the time I was a stuntman. I became very adept at falling off a horse.
Any nasty accidents?
I got bruised a lot. There was this terrible Italian pirate movie. There was one stunt for which I got paid $175 (£93), which was a fortune to me. There were four of us dressed as pirates and we were supposed to leap off this mast into the water. It was very high. So we jumped and there are two things I remember. One was: ‘Gee, I’m falling an awfully long time.’ And two was that when we hit the water it was like hitting concrete. Nothing broke but I was one big bruise for a week.
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