Mickey Gilbert was a veteran stuntman who performed daring feats as the stand-in for such actors as Robert Redford and Gene Wilder (1933–2016).
- Died: February 5, 2024 (Who else died on February 5?)
- Details of death: Died at his home in Camarillo, California, of natural causes at the age of 87.
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Mickey Gilbert’s legacy
Gilbert began working in stunts in the late 1950s, with some of his earliest credits coming in the epic classic “Ben-Hur” and the Sam Peckinpah (1925–1984) Western “The Wild Bunch.” It was the first of several films he’d work on with his future father-in-law, Joe Yrigoyen (1910–1998), another stuntman with hundreds of career credits. By the late 1960s, Gilbert’s career was busy, and he had begun stunt doubling for his former high school classmate, Redford, in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Gilbert can be seen in the scene in which Cassidy and Sundance jump off a cliff into a river – Redford and costar Paul Newman (1925–2008) made a short jump to a ledge under the cliff, but it was Gilbert and fellow stuntman Howard Curtis who plunged into the river below. Gilbert went on to stand in for Redford in many other films, including “The Sting,” “The Milagro Beanfield War,” “The Horse Whisperer,” and most recently, 2018’s “The Old Man & the Gun.”
Gilbert doubled for Wilder in the Mel Brooks classic “Blazing Saddles” as well as in “The World’s Greatest Lover,” “The Frisco Kid,” and “Stir Crazy.” Doubling for Wilder in “Silver Streak,” he leapt from a moving train onto a signal post. Gilbert was also the regular stunt double for Lee Majors on TV’s “The Fall Guy,” and he also became the show’s stunt coordinator. It was a favorite role for Gilbert, playing the stunt double to an actor who was playing the role of a stunt performer, and he was often given free rein over the action shots he created for the show.
In a career that spanned more than 50 years, the many other movies in which Gilbert performed stunts included “Beneath the Planet of the Apes,” “Cleopatra Jones,” “Westworld,” “The Towering Inferno,” “Every Which Way but Loose,” “The Blues Brothers,” and “Little Nikita.” He worked as stunt coordinator on such movies as “City Slickers,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “Apollo 13,” “A Time to Kill,” and “Mystery Men.” Gilbert also worked as second unit director on films like “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare,” “National Security,” and “Elf.”
Gilbert on “The Fall Guy”
“They liked our action so well they gave me the liberty to write any kind of action I wanted, so we did all kinds of action on that show. It was probably one of the most fun shows I ever did. I wasn’t really into TV, I was a feature guy, but when this thing came along I thought, ‘Wow, this could be good.’ As Lee being a stunt man in the movies, it just fit into everything that I was doing.” —from a 2012 interview for Screen Anarchy
Tributes to Mickey Gilbert
Full obituary: The Hollywood Reporter
