Dean Smith, who won a gold medal as a sprinter at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics before becoming a top-notch Hollywood stunt performer who worked on a dozen films starring John Wayne, has died. He was 91.
Smith died Saturday at his home in Breckenridge, Texas, after a battle with cancer, his friend Rob Word told The Hollywood Reporter.
Smith, who got into the business with help from James Garner, appeared in seven Paul Newman films, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), The Sting (1973) and The Towering Inferno (1974).
The tough Texan, who loved to say he could “ride, run and jump,” doubled for good friend Dale Robertson on the 1957-62 NBC series Tales of Wells Fargo, the 1964 film Blood on the Arrow and the 1966-68 ABC series Iron Horse.
He also did the dirty work for Ben Johnson on Cheyenne Autumn (1964) — one of four features he did with director John Ford — for George Hamilton in Evel Knievel (1971), for Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson (1972) and for Roy Rogers, one of his childhood heroes, on a 1982 episode of ABC’s The Fall Guy.
Smith was even fitted at Max Factor with a red wig and white bustle to step in for Maureen O’Hara on the Wayne-starring McLintock! (1963) when her character backs out of a two-story building and lands in a hay wagon and then holds onto the back of a moving barouche carriage.
“The other stuntmen just kidded me all over the place, said it looked like I had walnuts in my socks,” he told Word on a 2014 episode of the web series A Word on Westerns. “But anyway, I made more money on McLintock! than any of the other stuntmen, so you can’t complain on that.”
Born in Breckenridge on Jan. 15, 1932, Smith spent his early years on his grandparents’ sprawling ranch and found inspiration from cowboy stars Rogers, Gene Autry and Monte Hale on the big screen every Saturday…
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