During the late 80s and early 90s Laura Dash was the ultimate stunt double for child actors – the golden era of adventure movies.
At 5ft 4in she was the perfect body double for kids, appearing in hundreds of films including classics such as Jurassic Park, Halloween 4, Interview With A Vampire, Village Of The Damned, The Goonies, Hook and A Perfect World.
Laura got her first job on the 1981 movie Under The Rainbow, about the casting of munchkins in The Wizard Of Oz. After that she was offered stunt work and her career in our favourite childhood films really took off.
In a series of question and answer sessions posted to Reddit, she revealed some of her best stories from the time she spent hanging out with the stars.
In 1991’s Hook, Laura doubled for Wendy and some of the Lost Boys and said that the banter between Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman was one of the best parts of the job.
In 1993’s Jurassic Park, Laura acted as a double in the scene where Joseph Mazello gets thrown from the electric fence.
During filming in Hawaii, the cast and crew got caught in a hurricane and were trapped in a hotel basement – with director Steven Spielberg himself.
Laura said:
So we’re in the same room with Spielberg and all the actors, and I thought ‘Hey, if Steven Spielberg didn’t get out, he’s still here, then we’re all gonna be fine’.
The following morning, the producer managed to charter a private plane to pick up all the actors, but there wasn’t enough space so the rest of the crew had to stay.
With little choice, the hundred strong crew simply sat around playing cards until filming could resume:
So they got all the actors out, the kid actors, the director of photography, but while we were there, what are you gonna do? We played cards, UNO, we all just got to know each other.
As well as the blockbusters, Laura also worked on a lot of horror films involving kids. One of these was the 1995 John Carpenter movie Village of the Damned about a race of evil children.
But it was during her work on an earlier horror movie, 1988’s Halloween 4, that she suffered a terrifying accident whilst being dropped from a building.
Laura nearly lost her eye in the incident and she wrote on Reddit:
When I was dropped, they cut the support cable [and it] snapped and hit me in the face. That wasn’t supposed to happen.
In the epic childhood adventure, The Goonies, she mostly doubled for the character of Data but also acted in place of some of the other kids, and when asked what her favourite job had been, she couldn’t decide between the Goonies and Hook.
She added:
Goonies we got paid to go down waterslides. But on Hook the sets were amazing, and the cast and the crew and I mean – we would be laughing every day.
On top of these movies, Laura also appeared in Tales From The Crypt and, bizarrely, Burt Reynolds movie A Cop And A Half, where she doubled for black child actor Norman D. Golden II.
Nowadays she has packed in the acting and instead runs her own dog rescue website. She really has had the best jobs!
