Sunday Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 110

A NAME IN THE CREDITS CRASH! THERE GOES FALL-GUY WEAVER David Pilling meets a stuntman who lives by fire, and often by the sword THE MIDDLE-AGED MAN peering through thick spectacles 5 ft 7 in, of slim build and disarmingly modest doesn't look like a stuntman. But for the past 20 years Malcolm Weaver has been at the top of his profession, a career which has seen him hurled through windows and knocked down staircases in films ranging from A Clockwork Orange to Hope and Glory. The walls of his shabby office in Pinewood Studios are splattered with stills. One shows him dressed as a Tibetan, engulfed in flames. In another shot from White Nights, in which he doubled Baryshnikov he is running along a thin metal girder 50 ft above the ground.

"You've got to be a jack-of-alltrades," he says. "But I specialise in being thrown around by bigger blokes. With my build, I'm not going to get parts doubling Bond or Superman. If you're watching a film and someone goes flying through the air, it's probably me." Weaver started his career as a junior champion gymnast and, after a spell on the West End stage, graduated to celluloid in 1971 with an appearance in Murphy's War. "It's one of those professions which, once you've got a taste for it, makes it very hard to do anything else.

How else can you get good money and travel the world for doing nothing at all most of the time?" "Nothing at all" includes being dropped from a helicopter in a wheelchair, fighting Sigourney Weaver while imprisoned in the "glass-fibre coffin" of an Alien Queen suit, and a continual diet of being crushed against walls and run over by cars. His most dangerous stunt was in a Pink Panther film, where he was propelled from a Flamboyant: Weaver on the set of Licence to KIll golf-cart into the water. "We had to run into an 18 in wall at about eight miles an hour. The golf cart was so heavy I thought it would stop when it hit the wall and we would be catapulted out. We catapulted out all right, but the damn thing came sailing in after us." No-one was hurt on that occasion, but stuntmen are not always so lucky.

Weaver has escaped relatively lightly, with a few cracked ribs, minor burns and a broken thumb. The hundred or so Equity stunt artists have group insurance. "In a year when there are a lot of accidents the premium goes right up." His most famous role probably was doubling Kato, Inspector Clouseau's overzealous valet. Most of Weaver's lengthy fight scenes with Clouseau the sort which begin with Kato leaping from the fridge and end with the two ploughing through the floor into the flat below were with Peter Sellers's double. But when director Blake Edwards wanted a close-up, Weaver had to fight the genuine article.

"I was always a bit wary, though, because Sellers had a pacemaker. If he'd had a heart attack during one of my scenes, I would have been in big trouble. I have known stunt fights to go wrong and for the real actor to be knocked out cold." Stunts can be a fairly lucrative business. For a week on a film set the going rate which Weaver describes as "lousy" is £1,200, with an additional fee for each stunt, varying according to the degree of difficulty. Advertisements MANKOWITZ the pay better.

Caribbean A few for a days BP of filming commercial in earned him about £10,000. He did GERED eight of them last year. KIll Weaver admits to being nervous before big stunts, and says he would have no hesitation turning down a job he thought too dangerous. He will not, for example, jump more than 80 ft. "If they want a fall higher than that, then I tell them to find someone else.

It's easy to create the illusion of a high fall on film." But trickery cannot eliminate danger. Only recently, in a boat chase in Indiana Jones The Final Challenge, he got "a bit caught up" in a mock explosion. If he had not smeared protective cream on his skin, he could, he says, have been badly burnt. Such mishaps do not deter him. He fully intends to keep working until he is 60.

"Obviously, when you're older, you can't throw yourself around like a 20-year-old. But there are always simple jobs you can do. I am still one of only about half a dozen stuntmen who can do a row of backflips. To me, that's a piece of cake." 40 JULY 23 1989 7DAYS.