Jack Williams, 85; stuntman known for horse-riding skills

Jack Williams, a top Hollywood stuntman who got his first taste of stunt work on a horse at age 4 -- he was tossed from one rider to another in the 1926 silent film "The Flaming Forest" -- and later worked his way through USC riding horses and doing stunts in films such as "Gone With the Wind" and "Dodge City," has died. He was 85.

Williams, a charter member of the Stuntmen's Assn. of Motion Pictures and an inductee of the Hollywood Stuntmen's Hall of Fame, died of heart failure Tuesday at a Sylmar hospital, said his stepson, Robert Vairo.

Beginning with "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in 1936, Williams performed stunts in dozens of films over the next six decades, including "Santa Fe Trail, "They Died With Their Boots On," "Fort Apache," "Red River," "3 Godfathers," "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," "Rio Bravo," "Spartacus," "El Cid," "The Alamo," "The Magnificent Seven," "Cat Ballou" and "The Wild Bunch."

He also worked steadily doing stunts on dozens of television series, such as "Maverick," "Laramie" and "The High Chaparral," as well as playing small parts in numerous films and TV shows.

During his heyday as a stuntman, Williams was best known for having trained his horse to fall dramatically on cue at a given spot as if it had taken a bullet or arrow.

"He was the top falling-horse stuntman in the business," said stuntman Bob Hoy, who first worked with Williams in 1950. "He had a great horse called Coco, and they were inseparable. The horse had an instinct. A lot of horses will fight you when you get to the spot where they'll make the fall and won't go there. But Coco went there. She was just so great."

Said stuntman Joe Canutt: "You can get great falls a lot of times out of horses, but when you're attacking the Alamo, for example, and you've got bombs and cannons going off ... some of them don't work at all. That mare [Coco] consistently got spectacular falls."

But beyond doing the falling-horse stunt, Hoy said, "Jack drove stagecoaches, he wrecked wagons, he could transfer from the horse to the train -- he could do anything pertaining to horse work."

And, Hoy recalled, "in all the years I knew him, he never said 'ouch' on any of the stunts he did. That's saying he hit the ground, but he never complained."

Williams was born April 15, 1921, in Montana and moved with his family to Burbank a few years later. His mother, Paris, was a world-champion trick rider on the rodeo circuit, and both she and Williams' cowboy father, George, found work doing stunts in movies.