Film Stunt Girl Thought Taking Risks Would Be Interesting

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 19, 12 November 1948, Page 3

Film Stunt Girl Thought Taking Risks Would Be Interesting

Peggy Hughes is a film stunt girl, and an apparently normal, pretty woman who spends her life engaged in the most violent pursuits. “All I have to do,” she said in an interview -in “In Town Tonight,” the BBC’s magazine programme, “is a little ju-jitsu, fall out of windows, roll downstars, be thrown from galloping horses, or crash cars. Occasionally, when things are quiet, I may have to fight a few other girls, or be knocked about by a man. I take the' place of stars in situations where it would be unwise to risk injuring the star. As far as I know, I’m the only girl in the business who does the whole thing, though there are quite a lot of girls who are trained to take part in rough houses'; In “Good Time Girl” I got a rather nasty bang on the nose, but providing one trains carefully and practises a lot, it’s less dangerous than it seems. My very first big job was to be pushed off a balcony backwards—a fourteen foot fall. I took a look at the balcony and then

went out and had a wonderful lunch, including wine and everything I could get. I had quite made up my mind it would be my last lunch!” She took up her than energetic career because she thought it might be interesting. As she had been a riding instructress and also in the Land Army, she was fit. Now falling off a horse is as easy to her as—falling off a horse! But she rather makes a speciality of falling down stairs. In a Safety First picture due on the screen very soon she is to be knocked down bv a bus, run over by a car, and suffer several similar indignities. She admits that her boy friend isn’t over-keen on her job, especially, when she practises ju-jitsu on him, and keeps hoping she’ll give it up and settle down, but then, says Peggy, “I don’t know what callers would think if they arrived when I was falling downstairs or throwing the furniture about. Still, I could get a refined job—like a lady bouncer in a night club.”