I’ve just learned that 2012 began with the passing yesterday of the legendary swordmaster Bob Anderson, who trained and\/or doubled for every Hollywood swashbuckler from Errol Flynn to Orlando Bloom during his long life. Mr. Anderson was an Olympic fencer who started working in movies in the 1950s as a stunt double on Errol Flynn’s Master of Ballantrae<\/i>. (He was notoriously known for a time as “the man who stabbed Errol Flynn” because of a minor on-set accident.) Of somewhat more relevance to we nerdy Gen-Xers, Anderson doubled for Dave Prowse as Darth Vader during the climatic lightsaber duels in The Empire Strikes Back<\/i> and Return of the Jedi<\/i>. (He wasn’t credited, but no less a source than Mark Hamill — the guy on the other end of Vader’s saber — has reported it was so.) He also trained actors and choreographed fights for The Princess Bride<\/i>, the Lord of the Rings<\/i> trilogy, the 1993 version of The Three Musketeers<\/i> (that’d be the one with Charlie Sheen and Keifer Sutherland), the two Antonio Banderas Zorro <\/i>flicks, and, of course, the Pirates of the Caribbean<\/i> movies. He even trained Lindsay Lohan, of all people, for a scene in the remake of Disney’s The Parent Trap<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Anderson’s work first came to my attention as a result of my mid-1990s obsession with the Highlander <\/i>franchise — he was Sean Connery’s fight double in the original Highlander<\/i> film, and he worked with the star of the Highlander<\/i> TV series, Adrian Paul, during that show’s first season. As I read up on him, I was impressed by how many of my favorite films he’d had a hand in. In a sense, he’s had more influence on my cinematic tastes than any other single individual. What an amazing career this man had. <\/p>\n
Anderson was 89 years old. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve just learned that 2012 began with the passing yesterday of the legendary swordmaster Bob Anderson, who trained and\/or doubled for every Hollywood swashbuckler from Errol Flynn to Orlando Bloom during his long life. Mr. Anderson was an Olympic fencer who started working in movies in the 1950s as a stunt double on Errol Flynn’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-memoriam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}