She doubled for Pam Grier on Foxy Brown, dodged moving cars in The Blues Brothers and once spent an entire year in a body cast. All while fighting for the rights of other stunt performers
Jadie David’s entry into the movie business sounds like a scene from a film. It was 1971; she was 22 years old, living in Burbank, Los Angeles. She would regularly ride her horse in nearby Griffith Park. She knew most of the other riders out there, including an African American man named Bob Minor. “Bob used to ride up next to me and go: ‘Hi, how you doing?’” says David. “But I was like, ‘This guy’s flirting with me.’ I really didn’t pay much attention to him.” Minor told her he was in the movie industry and that he liked her look, and asked for her phone number. “So, I’m like, ‘This is Hollywood. Who knows what could happen?’”
Two weeks later, Minor called her. “He said: ‘I have this movie for you to do,’” David says. “‘We’re going to fly you to Arizona first class, we’re going to put you in a first-class hotel, you’re going to make …’ I forget what it was, but it was a lot of money back then.” Minor was a stunt performer. He was going to Arizona to work on a western, doubling for the actor Fred Williamson; they also needed a double for his co-star, Denise Nicholas, for scenes involving horse riding and “water work” – swimming and diving in rivers. David was tall, like Nicholas. At the time, she was studying to become a nurse; by comparison, this sounded like a holiday.
