George Leech

Stuntman and actor; Born: December 6, 1921; Died: June 17, 2012. GEORGE Leech, who has died aged 90, was one of the founders of the British Film stunt industry after the war, performing or co-ordinating stunts in scores of movies including the first dozen James Bond films starring Sean Connery and Roger Moore.

In the very first, Dr No in 1962, he was the stunt double for the eponymous villain, played by Joseph Wiseman, attacking Bond on a gantry. He also doubled as Bond, dangling from a Swiss Alpine cable car wheelhouse in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), when George Lazenby played 007 for the only time. The close-ups were shot in Pinewood Studios, where Leech dislocated a shoulder falling from a cable during filming.

In that same film’s ski chase, Leech also played a skier from the SPECTRE villains, eventually strangled by Bond. (That Bond was, in reality, another great stuntman, Vic Armstrong, who would become Leech’s son-in-law, marrying Wendy Leech, one of the world’s most in-demand stuntwomen.)

It was Leech, not Sean Connery, who drove the Aston Martin DB5 in the action sequences of Goldfinger (1964) and every true Bond aficionado knows that, in the same movie, Leech was the moustachioed man in a bullet-proof overal l test-targeted by Bond’s gadgets-man Q. In The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), it was Leech who drove Bond’s Lotus Esprit when Roger Moore was not in close-up.

Much loved by the stars he doubled for, who nicknamed him Gentleman George, Leech also won small acting roles in Bond and other movies. He was a henchman of bad guy Largo in a famous fist fight on board the ship Disco Volante in the 1965 movie Thunderball and was a villain in For Your Eyes Only (1981).

Leech also performed or choreographed stunts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, driving the car in several shots, in Kelly’s Heroes with Clint Eastwood, The Eagle Has Landed, The Guns of Navarone and other box-office hits.

The son of London dockworker Alfred Leech and his wife Louise, George Daniel Leech was born in