Early Life and Career
Mahoney was born in Chicago but reared in Davenport, Iowa. He entered the University of Iowa in Iowa City but dropped out to enlist in the United States Marine Corps when World War II began. He served as both a pilot and a flight instructor. After his discharge, he moved to Los Angeles, California, and for a time was a horsebreeder. However, he soon became a movie stuntman, doubling for Gregory Peck, Errol Flynn, and John Wayne. Director Vincent Sherman recalled staging the climactic fight scene in the 1948 film Adventures of Don Juan, and finding only one Hollywood stuntman who was willing to leap from a high staircase in the scene. The man was Mahoney, who demanded and received $1,000 for the dangerous stunt.
Billed as Jacques O'Mahoney in the late 1940s, he performed in several features, shorts, and serials for Columbia Pictures. He succeeded stuntman Ted Mapes as the double for Charles Starrett in the Durango Kid western series. The Durango Kid often wore a mask, which enabled Mahoney to replace Starrett in the action scenes. Mahoney's daring stunts made it seem that the older Starrett grew, the more athletic he became.
Read more about this topic: Jock Mahoney
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“In an early spring
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Hope gives not so much warrant, as despair
That frosts will bite them.”
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“If, then, we would indeed restore mankind ... let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.”
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“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
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