Stuntman Roy still going strong

F three score years and ten is man's allotted span, then Roy Scammell's run his. If he was a cat, he'd have used eight lives, at least. This is not a man insurance companies are queuing up to sign.

Mr Scammell is a stuntman not a retired one, either, even though he's 70. Why, only last week he was falling off a telegraph pole backwards. But that's just chicken feed to Roy.

In a career that reads not unlike a film script he's worked with the greats Frank Sinatra once walked quarter of a mile across a desert after seeing Roy parachute from a blazing plane to say 'That was a great thing you did there, kid' and carried out stunts that are as legendary as the stars.

If you need someone to plunge into the sea from a blazing oil rig, drop down a gorge, crash through the window of a tower block, brave an inferno, hang from a helicopter or rev a car across a ravine, this unsung hero of many a Bond is your man.

Remember Steve McQueen's incredible motorbike leap to freedom over barbed wire in The Great Escape? It was the hair raising stunt he famously did himself but not without Roy's help.

"We both did the jump," said Roy. " I set it up and test jumped it first, then he insisted on doing it himself. Both sequences were filmed and Steve pulled it off brilliantly, so obviously that's what they used. The insurance company went mad."

But it was his neck rather than McQueen's on the line when he doubled for the actor again in Papillon, another escape film, this time from Devil's Island. "McQueen's character jumps into the sea from a cliff about 90 feet high. The tide varied between 10 feet and 40 feet and I had to gauge the wave and hit it right.

"You get a sack of something roughly the same weight as yourself and chuck it over to see how long it takes to fall.

"I did it in one take you don't do a stunt like that more than once."

Nor would he want to repeat the bizarre death fall in A Clockwork Orange, the violent cult film banned for 30 years until its recent re-release on television gripped a new generation.

By a spooky coincidence, Roy and I are standing below the high window he plunged from because it was filmed at Edgwarebury Hotel in Barnet Lane, Borehamwood, where his daughter, Karen, is now business development manager.

Even on a bright sunny day that steep mock Tudor facade brought back the menace of Stanley Kubrick's surreal masterpiece. "Every week we still have people come in and ask if this is where Clockwork Orange was filmed," said Karen. It brought her father two of his biggest challenges.

"I was in Malta working on Zeppelin when the assistant director said would I like to do a fight sequence in this film Kubrick was making. So I went to a house in Radlett and there was Malcolm MacDowell with Warren Clarke and Patrick McNee.

"He said 'I want to do something really futuristic', and I have always liked Gene Kelly and thought of him doing his rain scene, dancing with that umbrella. So we did this vicious beating up and rape sequence to Singing in the Rain, so it was quite stylized. I think that made it all the more vicious and horrific."

In the window plunge, the MacDowell character is locked in a room and driven mad with Beethoven symphonies, finally leaping through the window to escape the music. Roy stares up, reliving it; it was a tricky jump outwards from the third floor, to clear a projecting roof, using a pile of boxes to break his fall.

"I think that tree's grown since then," is all he says. That was the first time he met Stanley Kubrick but he subsequently worked in 2001: A Space Odyssey, "floating around on wires".

Roy, who now lives in Bricket Wood, has survived a career spanning over 40 years. He has worked with everyone from John Wayne to Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe to Marilyn Monroe, and thrilled in more Bonds than he can remember.

"In For Your Eyes Only I jumped across a ravine in Corfu and had to drop 50 feet before I hit the nets. But I think my favourite was From Russia With Love when I was the double in that fight in the train," he said.

We all know Bond will survive but his stuntman double can be in real danger. Stuntmen get hurt and even killed. Roy says meticulous planning and leaving nothing to chance have kept him alive. His only serious accident, when his scalp was sliced open from forehead to crown requiring 15 stitches, happened in The World is Full of Married Men because someone removed the Perspex he had put there to protect himself.

So does he enjoy his work? "I don't think enjoy is the right word, there is always a sense of foreboding about what could happen. You do think about it in the night. If a guy says he's not apprehensive, that's rubbish.

"But I do enjoy that buzz of fear, and the challenge. The prestige and kudos are satisfying and of course the money is very good," he added.

Perhaps his narrowest escape was when he was left hanging under a car on the edge of a frozen waterfall in Sweden, where Tony Curtis supposedly falls asleep at the wheel in Monte Carlo Or Bust. Roy was safely strapped in harness and the crew took a ten-minute break, jokingly leaving him dangling.

"But one of them took pity and came back and got me out for a cup of tea and as we walked away we heard a rumbling and the whole rig started to slide down and that car went over the edge and through the ice," he said.

In Greystoke it took Roy, dressed as an ape, four hours to get a sequence with a live panther which was supposed to knock him into a lake.

Shivering in a sodden ape costume he was called to the phone where a posh voice asked him to go to a West End Theatre. Thinking it was a wind up, he said "stop messing about" and hung up later to find it was Andrew Lloyd Webber commissioning him to arrange skate racing scenes in a possible new musical. It was Starlight Express and it ran for 18 years.

Roy's own career began in the skating rink. It was his hobby as a boy in Wembley where he became the youngest English senior ice hockey player, playing for Wembley Lions.

To earn extra cash, he put on a short act jumping over barrels on his skates, which led to ice shows and a tour with Holiday On Ice. His sports skills brought a short acting role in a rugby scrum in Vice Versa with Diana Dors and Anthony Newley, who was to become a close friend.

But his real career began in the Ice Circus in Las Vegas. He was given trapeze lessons by the Great Badini who went off to double for Tony Curtis in Trapeze, had a bit of an accident, and asked Roy to stand in: "That's really how the stunt work started".

Today Roy still earns his living as a stuntman, but his career has broadened to the creative side. He came up with the concept for Ice Warriors, sold it to LWT, and helped turn it into a hugely successful 13-episode TV series.

With St Albans photographer and film maker Donato Cinicolo, he's currently working on an idea he had for a comedy series called Bonjour Fritz, based in a holiday camp. "It's sort of 'Allo 'Allo meets Dad's Army," said Roy.

Feisty, fit and looking nearer 50 than 70, this is one pensioner you won't find queueing for a bus pass unless they need someone to drive a double decker over Niagra.

March 6, 2003 10:30