Grant Page, the Australian stunt icon who performed in and coordinating stunts for the original Mad Max, sequel Beyond Thunderdome, the upcoming prequel Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and more than 100 other films and TV series, died Thursday in a car crash. He was 85.
His son, Leroy Page, told Daily Mail Australia that his father hit a tree while he was driving near his home in Kendall, New South Wales. “He died in very high spirits, and he was very motivated,” the younger Page told the paper. “He was very happy.”
A legend of Aussie cinema, Page worked with his Oscar-winning countryman George Miller on the 1979 action classic Mad Max, which introduced the world to Mel Gibson. He performed and served as stunt coordinator on that gas-guzzling post-apocalyptic thriller as well as its 1985 second sequel Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, which also starred Tina Turner. He also worked on Miller’s upcoming prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which is on the radar to premiere at Cannes in May, and on his 2022 pic Three Thousand Years of Longing.
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Born in 1939 in Adelaide, Page launched his career in the mid-1970s and coordinated and performed stunts for The Man from Hong Kong, starring Jimmy Wang Yu and one-time James Bond actor George Lazenby. Released in the U.S. as The Dragon Flies, the pic has been cited as an influence by Quentin Tarantino.
Page worked on dozens of other projects including the 1978 mockumentary Stunt Rock — billed as “Death Wish at 120 decibels” — in which he starred as himself, taking a job with a hard rock band in Los Angeles. He also was a focus of the 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Untold Story of Ozploitation! Written and directed by Mark Hartley, it focused on the 1970s Australian New Wave and low-budget 1980s pics. Tarantino, Miller, Jamie Lee Curtis and Dennis Hopper are among the interviewees.
In the movie, filmmaker Brian Trenchard-Smith says of Page, “He’s the guy you get to dodge the cars, slide down the cliff on fire, jump into the water and fight the shark.”
Page was the focus of Trenchard-Smith’s well-titled documentary Dangerfreaks, which focused on the stuntman’s legendary career.