Off The Record
The Legendary Australian Stunt Performer Known For Mad Max And Many More, Has Passed Away
The enormous Australian stunt performer Grant Page, who was well-known for his amazing performances in movies like Mad Max, The Man From Hong Kong, and Mad Dog Morgan, has passed away. He was eighty-five.
According to his son Leroy Page, who spoke to Daily Mail Australia, Page passed away on Thursday when his vehicle collided with a tree close to his home in Kendall, on the New South Wales coast.
Brian Trenchard-Smith directed more than a dozen movies, including The Stuntmen (1973), King Fu Killers (1974), The Man From Hong Kong (1973), in which Page fights martial arts expert Jimmy Wang Yu with knives, cleavers, and meat hooks, Deathcheaters (1976), Stunt Rock (1978), and Hospitals Don’t Burn Down! (1978).
Trenchard-Smith also recorded Page on the observation deck of the Empire State Building in New York, standing on a ledge beyond the perimeter gate, for the 1987 documentary Dangerfreaks.
Page “successfully tampered with the laws of physics and probability,” Trenchard-Smith wrote Thursday in a blog post. “The ‘have a go’ spirit, the ‘think it through, take good aim and go for it’ quality that has distinguished Australian achievers in all fields of endeavor was clearly present in Grant.”
“He had courage and daring, tempered by a realistic attitude about the risks of his profession in the era before computer-generated stunts.”
Page famously crashed a car through a caravan in George Miller’s Mad Max (1979) and came out only limping (he did start the stunt with a broken leg, after all). Then, in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), he made a comeback for Miller.
Page trained with Australia’s special military outfit, the Commandos, for years after graduating from the University of Adelaide. Trenchard-Smith was his early manager and helped him master abilities like parachuting and rappelling that he would utilize in the films.
Page was on fire as he leaped backward down an 80-foot cliff in Dennis Hopper’s 1976 film Mad Dog Morgan. Additionally, Page played a version of himself in the mockumentary Stunt Rock, performing risky stunts for a television program while visiting the heavy metal band Sorcery in Los Angeles.
Page did filmmaker Mark Hartley a favor by setting himself on fire as a publicity stunt prior to the debut of the 2008 documentary, Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!, which explored forgotten Australian genre cinema. (Page frequently avoided wearing the conventional fire suit.)
Quentin Tarantino, George Lazenby (for whom Page served as a stand-in in The Man From Hong Kong), and Stacy Keach (the antagonist of Page’s character in 1981’s Road Games) all give Page praise in the documentary.
“Everyone agreed that he was the single most fearless man they had ever met — and quite possibly the luckiest,” Hartley wrote in a foreword for Page’s 2009 memoirs, Man on Fire: A Stunt of a Life.
Page began working continuously in the mid-1970s, most recently as a stunt coordinator for movies such as The Defector (2018), Gods of Egypt (2016), Mechanic: Resurrection (2016), Hartley’s Patrick: Evil Awakens (2013), and The Legend of the Five (2020).
His sons, Adrian, Jeremy, Leroy, a grip and stunt performer, and Gulliver, a stunt performer (X-Men: Origins, Suicide Squad), are among the survivors.
Scott McGee’s 2022 book Danger on the Silver Screen, which honors the best stunts in movies, also gives Page a lot of credit.
“He was the kind of stuntman that harkened to those of the silent era, when men and women often approached a stunt by just winging it,” McGee wrote. “He said in an interview, ‘If I worried about coming out of stunts alive, I’d have a gut full of ulcers.’”
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