Lila Shanley

Lila Georgia Everett was born in Los Angeles, California, on November 28, 1909.[1] She was the daughter of Elmer E. Everett and Lila G. Baugh.[1] Her father worked in real estate and her mother was a housewife.[1] Growing up in the beachfront community of Venice, she often dove for coins from tourists at the Venice Hot Salt Water Plunge.[2]

At age 19, she married her first husband, Charles Thornton Finn (born 1899), an American water polo player.[3][4] She later remarried to Samuel Shanley, with whom she had one son, Barry, an attorney.[5]

At age 27, the blonde, 5 ft 3 in-tall (160 cm) Shanley was hired as the stunt double for Dorothy Lamour in The Hurricane (1937).[2] An expert swimmer,[6] she handled all of Lamour's swimming and diving scenes shot on location in Pago Pago, American Samoa, and Catalina Island.[2][7] In one scene, Shanley lowered her sarong and was filmed diving into a lagoon in the nude.[2] After The Hurricane became a hit, Shanley was hired to double for Lamour in her subsequent films.[8]

Shanley went on to double for a succession of leading actresses, including Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, Paulette Goddard in Reap the Wild Wind and Unconquered, Donna Reed in It's a Wonderful Life, Betty Hutton in The Perils of Pauline, and Sandra Dee in A Summer Place.[9] She also doubled for Jane Powell, Olivia de Havilland, Ida Lupino, Veronica Lake, Joan Fontaine, Frances Dee, and Sonja Henie.[9] She appeared in more than 100 films.[10][5] In 1947, Jerry Fairbanks produced The Stunt Girl, a short documentary film highlighting her career to date.[11]

Shanley performed a wide range of stunts. In the escape from Atlanta scene in Gone with the Wind, she rode in a horse-drawn carriage through the burning warehouses of the railroad depot.[12] In the graduation party scene in It's a Wonderful Life, she fell into a swimming pool that lay underneath the retractable floor of a high school gymnasium.[13] In Unconquered, she and stuntman Ted Mapes rode a canoe on the rapids then jumped out to grasp an overhanging tree limb;[14] she also sustained an attack of "flaming arrows" in the same film.[15] In To Catch a Thief, Shanley leaped from rooftop to rooftop, then rolled down a slanted roof and broke her fall.[10] She had also "jumped out of bombers, been chased by lions, clawed by tigers, and thrown overboard into icy ocean waters at night", and served as the target for a knife-and-hatchet-thrower.[16] Shanley said stair falls were her favorite stunt, explaining, "They are the most rewarding because everyone thinks they look great. They're quite simple, actually".[2]

In 1981, the Chicago Tribune said that Shanley, then aged 72, "may be the oldest working stuntwoman in America". It credited her long and injury-free career to her conditioning program, which involved swimming 50 laps daily and playing beach volleyball.[17]

Shanley was the manager of the Santa Monica Mariners women's volleyball team, which won several division titles.[18] From 1955 to 1960, Shanley was a member of the United States women's national volleyball team.[9][5] During this time, the national team competed in two world championships, winning the silver medal in the 1959 Pan American Games.[5] Shanley was the oldest U.S. woman athlete at the 1959 Games.[19]

Shanley was the founding president of the Stuntwomen's Association of Motion Pictures, established in 1958.[5][20] She was also a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild.[7]

Shanley was inducted into the Stuntwomen's Hall of Fame.[9] She received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Women in Film.[9]

Shanley died from heart failure on November 15, 1996, aged 86, at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica.[9][5][21]

Sources:[9][10][22][23]

• Freese, Gene Scott (2014). Hollywood Stunt Performers, 1910s-1970s: A Biographical Dictionary (2nd ed.). McFarland. ISBN 9780786476435.
• Gregory, Mollie (2015). Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-813-16624-7.
• Slide, Anthony (2012). Hollywood Unknowns: A History of Extras, Bit Players, and Stand-Ins. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-617-03475-6.

• Lila Shanley at IMDb
• Women Volleyball Panamerican Games 1959 Chicago (USA) - 29.08-06.09 Winner Brazil