- Born
- Died
- Birth nameRussell Maurice Saunders
- The Canadian National Championship gymnastics and diving winner, Russell Saunders was a stunt double for Alan Ladd, Gene Kelly, Red Buttons, Robert Cummings and Jack Benny. A fixture at Santa Monica's Muscle Beach, Saunders instructed aspiring acrobats who trained there. During WWII he served as an army war correspondent. Saunders has participated in one form or another in over 500 films throughout his career and spent 12 years training actors for the "Circus of the Stars" series of TV specials.- IMDb Mini Biography By: vicdru@hotmail.com
- Russell Saunders was born in 1919, the youngest of eight children, on a farm outside Winnipeg, Canada. As a boy he would jump off the barn cradling chickens, convinced that the birds' wings would enable him to fly. He began to develop his acrobatic skills at summer camp, and in his teens won Canadian championships in diving and gymnastics. He tried to enlist in the Canadian Air Force but was turned down because of color-blindness. He was offered diving scholarships by USC and UCLA but went to Hollywood instead, where he appeared in a water show starring Bing Crosby and began to get work as a movie stuntman.
Russell Saunders first performed on screen as part of a troupe of acrobats in The Great Profile (1940) starring John Barrymore, and had one of his first important jobs as a stuntman in Hitchcock's great thriller Saboteur (1942), in which he doubled for Robert Cummings jumping off a 60ft bridge and swimming 100 yards while handcuffed. He doubled in more than a hundred films for such stars as Charles Boyer, Jack Benny and Steve McQueenand for Alan Ladd in the gunfight in Shane. He was a regular double for Gene Kelly, performing stunts in The Pirate (1948), The Three Musketeers (1948) and Singin' in the Rain (1952). One of his most famous stunts occurred in The Three Musketeers, in which he leaped from roof-top to roof-top, caught a waving flag that ripped, then swung on its shreds to land in a window.
In 1950 Saunders was chosen by Salvador Dali as the model for his painting The Christ of St John of the Cross -- which led fellow stuntmen to call him "the ultimate double". The painting hung originally in Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, then for several years in the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art, also in Glasgow. In 2006 it was returned to the Kelvingrove when it reopened after refurbishment.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Jojo Jones
- He was the model for Salvador Dalí's painting "The Christ of St John of the Cross" (1951). He was photographed in Hollywood in the pose of the crucified Christ and Dali then worked from the photos in his studio in Spain.
- Funeral services were held June 6, 2001 at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood, California.
- Brother of fellow stuntman Ray Saunders.
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