Richard Graydon

"Richard Graydon, who has died aged 92, was a former amateur jockey who became one of the most celebrated stuntmen in the business, keeping cinemagoers on the edges of their seats in some of the most hair-raising sequences in the James Bond canon.
Graydon’s first outing as “007” came in 1969 when he doubled for George Lazenby, tobogganing down the Cresta Run at breakneck speed in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. In one terrifying sequence, in which Bond effects his escape from Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s mountaintop eyrie, Graydon was required to slide down, using a piece of chain, to a cable-car dangling over the abyss. “The drop was about 80 feet,” he recalled. “The only safety devices I had were two hooks in the palm of my hand attached to my safety belt. The difficulty was that ice had formed on the cable.”
The scene was filmed without mishap and 10 years later Graydon was again to be found atop a cable-car, this time suspended hundreds of feet above the ground in Rio de Janeiro, doubling for Roger Moore in the scene in Moonraker (1979) where Bond fights the steel-toothed “Jaws” (fellow stuntman Martin Grace). On this occasion things nearly came unstuck when Graydon slipped and was left hanging from the cable-car by just one hand without any safety hooks. “One slip and it would have been certain death,” he said, recalling the episode as “the nastiest moment of my career”.
Graydon performed in 10 Bond films in total. In You Only Live Twice (1967), he was seen abseiling down into a volcano and made a brief appearance as a Russian cosmonaut. In Octopussy he replaced Martin Grace (who had been injured on the second day of filming) as Roger Moore’s stunt double for much of the sequence in which Bond makes his way along the roof of a moving train, fighting off henchmen of the arch villain Kamal Khan, with the action taking place on top, hanging on to the side and even under the train. He also played the part of “Francisco the Fearless” – the man who gets shot out of a cannon at Octopussy’s circus.
Martin Grace described Graydon as the most courageous stuntman he had ever worked with: “He treated hanging in the rafters of a volcano 120 feet up, and on top of the cable car in Rio as if he was having a coffee down at Piccadilly Circus in London. He made what other stuntmen claimed as too dangerous and impossible look like a walk in the park.”
Inevitably such daredevilry came at a cost. Graydon broke an arm in four places when the horse he was riding in Waltz of the Toreadors (1962, with Peter Sellers) collided with a camera car. Worse was to come at a stunt show in Sweden in the 1970s, when a guide wire snapped as he was launching himself off the top of a tall tower. He broke his back and both legs and was in hospital for 14 weeks.
Richard Graydon was born on May 12 1922 into a theatrical family. His grandfather owned the Middlesex Music Hall (now the New London Theatre) in Drury Lane and his father was an agent and manager for such stars as Maurice Chevalier.
By contrast, after leaving Stowe Richard Graydon began his career as a gentleman jockey working for trainers – an occupation which, he later observed, provided an excellent grounding in stunt work and also brought him his first injuries. On one occasion he broke his neck and a leg riding for Boggy Whelan in a novice chase at Wye. The nearest he got to success on the turf was coming third on Squire’s Mount in the amateur riders’ Carnarvon Cup at Salisbury.
Graydon continued to ride out for trainers as he embarked on his showbusiness career, first as a dancer at the Windmill and other London theatres. Partially blinded in one eye following a childhood accident, he was turned down for wartime service in the RAF, though he performed with Ensa in India."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11316314/Richard-Graydon-obituary.html

 

RIP Sir