“She Made Her Own Dreams Happen”: Mallory O’Meara on Hollywood’s First Stuntwoman.

Did you know that the first stuntwoman began working before Hollywood’s creation in the 1910s? I bet you thought the first stuntwoman would have coincided with the rise of female-led action movies in the 1980s, or the emergence of the Blacksploitation genre in the 1970s.

So did author Mallory O’Meara. She was so taken aback when she came across Helen Gibson, Hollywood’s first stuntwoman, during research for her previous book, Girls Make Movies, that she immediately emailed her agent, asserting that Gibson would be the topic of O’Meara’s next book. Enter: Daughter of Daring: The Trick-Riding, Train-Leaping, Road-Racing Life of Helen Gibson, Hollywood’s First Stuntwoman, published this week.

In the comprehensive and funny biography, O’Meara regales readers with how Gibson rode a motorbike across a moving train 75 years before Michelle Yeoh did it in Supercop and 95 years before Tom Cruise did it in Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part 1. And Gibson’s stunt was onto an actual train, not a stunt one. Women just do it better—and first, as early pioneers of the film industry.

The below interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Tell me about your research process. You write that it was hard to find factual information about Gibson because the Hollywood apparatus was big into publicising fake biographies of its stars.

That’s the problem. It was both very easy and very difficult because Helen was a star during her time. There were tonnes of interviews with her and lots of magazines that had featured her, but everything that I found I had to verify because, especially for Helen, which wasn’t even her real name—she [took] over Helen Holmes’ role in The Hazards of Helen—so a lot of her background was fabricated. The fake story was interesting, but I honestly think that her real story is even more fascinating. She ran away with the rodeo as a teenager—I think they should have kept that.

Could you talk about how Gibson carved out this career for herself in Hollywood before Hollywood even existed?

What’s beautiful about Helen is that she made her own dreams happen. She ran away as a teenage girl and landed in Hollywood working as a background actor in this wild west show she was travelling with. She wanted a life of excitement, but back then it was pretty rare for a woman to have a life of excitement where she was independent. But she made it happen through pure determination. She kept working until someone noticed her. She was fearless, and that was her greatest skill. She was an incredible performer. She had an eye for stunts and what was going to look good. It all came down to how brave she was and how willing she was to give her audience a thrill. She was more than happy to jump off or onto something, no matter what vehicle it was. That’s what I admire about her: that she continued to push the envelope as much as she possibly could and [she] created her career for her[self].

So when did the stuntwoman become a thing?

Helen was the first. Before Helen, it was men in wigs and dresses. After Helen, people realised that women could do these things as well. It was very frustrating because Helen had this heyday in early Hollywood when there were so many women filmmakers and so many incredible roles for women, but then women got pushed out of Hollywood and so did stuntwomen. Not only did they go back to men doing [stunts], there weren’t men action roles for women for quite a long time. There were some women working in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, Helen included, but it was a pretty small group. They were kind of working in the shadows and not getting as many roles as they should have.

Things didn’t start to explode until the late 1960s when women returned to Hollywood. I would say the 1970s was when stuntwomen really became a thing [again] with the rise of exploitation movies, Blacksploitation movies. All of a sudden there were more action roles for women.

It’s a double-edged sword but by then, [roles for women] were more sexualised and objectified and the costumes had gotten so skimpy, they couldn’t really have men do stunts for women because there was nowhere to hide [their bodies], so they needed more stuntwomen. They couldn’t keep them out [anymore].

It’s interesting how women are often early pioneers of industry before they’re taken “seriously” and thus taken over by the patriarchy, which is kind of what happened here right?

We’re so used to looking to modern times and to the future, but over 100 years ago, there were more women working in Hollywood than there are now. It wasn’t just the patriarchy. It was corporations coming to Hollywood and [asserting] that women can’t be in business, women can’t be trusted to make decisions. It’s heartbreaking because there’s definitely an alternate universe where that never happened and Hollywood is very different.