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Fall Girl: My Life as a Western Stunt Double - Coming in April

Martha Crawford Cantarini worked in an era when film stunts were performed by daring and highly-skilled men and women rather than being modeled by CGI. Raised in a family close to horses and Hollywood, she became one of the top show riders in America before becoming one of the small, elite group of female stunt riders working in the movie industry of the nineteen-fifties. When she retired from movies, Martha went on to have her own television show in Las Vegas with a trained stunt horse, Frosty. Now living in British Columbia, Canada, Martha has broken down many barriers during her life and integrated her love for horses and her knowledge of working with them into a truly inspirational life in the book, Fall Girl: My Life as a Western Stunt Double (McFarland).

In 2004, Martha was accepted into the Stuntmen's Hall of Fame and the following year she became only the third stunt-woman to be honoured with the Golden Boot Award. Sponsored by the Motion Picture and TV Fund, the Award was known as the 'Western Oscar' and previous winners have included Clint Eastwood, Tom Selleck, Maureen O'Hara, Fess Parker, Dale Evans and Roy Rogers. Martha was also a consultant to Laura Hillenbrand for her book Seabiscuit, and Martha's website, www.SecondRunning.com is a popular site for horse racing history and Western movie history buffs.

Book Synopsis
Martha's stepfather, Carl Crawford, was a professional polo player who coached, played and socialised with prominent members of Hollywood society, so she grew up with child actors such as Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney, and Judy Garland to become one of the top show riders in California. However, what she really dreamed of was to ride in the movies.

When she was eventually given a contract, she became the regular stunt double while based at MGM for such well-known actors as Eleanor Parker (to whom Martha bore a remarkable resemblance), Ann Baxter, Claudette Colbert, Lana Turner, Debra Padget, Carol Baker and Shirley MacLaine as well as Charlton Heston, Ronald Reagan and Clark Gable in such famous movies of the fifties as Love Me Tender, Big Country, Yellow Sky, Rains of Ranchipur, A King and Four Queens, The Seventh Sin, and My Friend Flicka.

Martha's biography provides an insider's look at the stars of the time and the way films were made under legendary directors, as well as recounting her personal experiences doing the stunts themselves. To perform these, Martha worked with horses that were trained to specialize in particular stunt areas, for example to fall, rear, drag, chase, jump, or to pull buggies, buckboards or coaches, and three of them were great stunt horse stars of that era: Ski, Jim and Midnight, the famous Western movie horse ridden by such actors as Audie Murphy, Clint Eastwood and Henry Fonda.

When the major studios began to phase out memorable western films, Martha returned to showing and training horses. With her own palomino horse Frosty, that she had raised and trained from a baby, she had a live television program in Las Vegas and made many personal appearances together and numerous live TV commercials. Frosty became renowned as the 'gambling horse' after showing he could roll a seven at the craps table in the Thunderbird Casino.

"I let the horses be my teachers," Martha says. "I have always found that as we strive to learn the best ways to motivate our horses, in reality, they motivate us to be the best that we can be."

Collaborating Author:
Collaborating with Martha on this project is Chrystopher J Spicer whose acclaimed work Clark Gable: Biography was published in the United States in 2002 to mark the centenary of Gable's birth. Since released in Australia, the UK, and Europe, this was the first biography of a major Hollywood star written by an Australian to be published in the United States. Classic Images magazine noted that this was "an important scholarly work . . . with a well-rounded picture of 'The King.' Absolutely, this is choice Gable, well-written and very extensive in its coverage . . . the one that finally got it right." Evan Williams wrote in the national newspaper The Weekend Australian that "with no shortage of Gable biographies . . . this may well be the best."

Spicer has been writing about Australian and American history and film for many years and was a contributing editor of the former monthly Australian arts magazine The Melburnian. He was a co-author of the first sociological history of cemeteries published in Australia, Cemeteries: Our Heritage, and the following year he completed Duchess: The Story of the Windsor Hotel, a history of the life and times of Australia's last Victorian-era Grand Hotel. He was also a consultant and a contributing author for the first encyclopaedia of a city to be compiled in Australia, the impressive Encyclopaedia of Melbourne published by Cambridge University Press in 2004. He currently teaches writing at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia.

Later this year, McFarland will release a companion volume by Chrystopher Spicer to his earlier Gable biography that will be a photo compilation of Gable's life containing many candid photos of him never before published.

You can find Fall Girl listed in the current McFarland Spring catalogue at: http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-4753-4 It can also be ordered through bookstores and from Amazon.