- Born: Oct 05, 1941
- Occupation: Actor, Director
- Active: '70s-2000s
- Major Genres: Action, Spy Film
- Career Highlights: A Touch of Class, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Charlie's Angels
- First Major Screen Credit: Arabesque (1966)
Biography
One of the cinema's most accomplished and prolific stunt men, Vic Armstrong has been working for over 30 years on both sides of the Atlantic, in a breathtaking variety of films. A native of Glasgow, Scotland, Armstrong made his stunt debut as a double for Gregory Peck in Stanley Donen's Arabesque (1966). He went on to do stunt work in countless films and television shows throughout the latter half of the 1960s, contributing to such diverse productions as The Peter Cook and Dudley Moore Show, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), and You Only Live Twice (1969).Thanks to his prowess in executing the most complicated of stunts with unerring accuracy, Armstrong quickly segued into the role of stunt coordinator, first working in this capacity on Joseph Losey's 1970 Figures in a Landscape. His role as a stunt coordinator for such films as the first two Superman installments was complemented by his work as a double for a number of leading men, including Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland, Malcolm McDowell, and Jon Voight. Perhaps most famously, Armstrong served as Harrison Ford's double for all three Indiana Jones films, work that was made all the more successful by his resemblance to and friendship with Ford. The stunt man would also double Ford in a number of the actor's other films, including Witness (1985), The Mosquito Coast (1986), and Working Girl (1988). Along with George Lucas, Armstrong was the only creative member of the crew to serve on all three Indy films, something that led him to make his directorial debut as the helmer of the second season premiere of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
Armstrong added to his directorial CV with the 1992 Joshua Tree, an action thriller starring Dolph Lundgren and George Segal (the latter of whom Armstrong had doubled in the 1973 A Touch of Class), and as the second unit director on such films as The Phantom (1996), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), The World Is Not Enough (1999), and Entrapment (1999). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he also continued to do incredibly prolific stunt work for films of every conceivable genre, from Empire of the Sun (1987) to Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989) to Rob Roy (1995), further cementing his already sterling reputation as one of the film industry's most indispensable members. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide
