Grant Page, known for his stunts in Mad Max, has died at the age of 85 in a car crash.
He was driving alone near his New South Wales home in Australia on Thursday when he crashed into a tree.
Emergency services arrived at the scene very quickly.
His 49-year-old son, Leroy Page, informed Daily Mail Australia, and described his father as a ‘legend’.
‘He passed away in high spirits and was very motivated. He was very happy,’ Leroy shared.
Page also worked on Mad Max sequel Furiosa, The Man From Hong Kong, and Mad Dog Morgan. He played a killer in Roadgames, a film Quentin Tarintino has praised. The famous director also commended him in the documentary, Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!, which focused on Australian cinema.
Page had a long-lasting professional relationship with director Brian Trenchard-Smith, contributing to many of his films including The Stuntmen, King Fu Killers, and The Man From Hong Kong. In these sequences, Page demonstrated martial arts using items such as knives and cleavers.
Trenchard-Smith paid tribute to Page, saying he ‘delivered Hollywood-level action and mayhem’.
‘Grant Page was Australia’s pioneer stunt performer and my friend for fifty-two years. I will miss him terribly,’ he wrote on his website.
‘He was an inspiring man, who lived uncompromisingly.
‘Most people accept that age weighs upon us, gravity holds us down, death awaits us if we dare too much. Not necessarily, said Grant, as he successfully tampered with the laws of physics and probability.’
In Mad Men, Page hit a caravan with a car. ‘Such eye-popping stunts were a major contribution to the development of our film industry, and got Australian genre films international respect,’ wrote Trenchard-Smith.
‘Our world will not be the same without him in it,’ he concluded the tribute.
Director Mark Hartley called him the ‘single most fearless man they had ever met — and quite possibly the luckiest’.
Before his film career, Page trained with the special forces unit Commandos which helped him to develop skills such as parachuting.
As he developed his skillset, Page became a stunt coordinator – most recently on The Legend of the Five in 2020.
He is survived by his four sons – Gulliver, who has been a stuntman on X Men: Origins and Suicide Squad, fellow stunt performer Leroy, Adrian and Jeremy.
