Submitted by TheBrands360 t3_y3ty30 in movies
I’d say Eli Wallach probably takes the cake. Famous for playing Tuco in Sergio Leone’s timeless classic The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Wallach thrice(!) almost died during shooting. It’s a miracle he made it out the set alive before the end credits. A better question would be: “What movie scene didn’t nearly kill Wallach performing it?”
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At one point, Wallach tried to drink from a soda bottle only to find that a careless set assistant had left an identical bottle filled with acid around… he drank it, nearly passed out and had to have his stomach pumped out immediately. The next day, like a trooper, Tuco was back at the set!
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Another time, Wallach was filming a scene in which he was seated on a horse with a prop noose around his neck. A fake pistol shot was fired and the noose broke, but the shot frightened the horse. It started running with the actor still on its back, unable to free himself because his hands were tightly tied behind his back for the scene. The horse ran for almost a mile before some film crew members managed to catch up to it, calmed it down, and freed Wallach, who had somehow managed to stay on the horse and survived.
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Lastly, our unlucky buddy Tuco almost got decapitated by a train. During an elaborate scene in which Wallach and his captor were chained together, the two men were supposed to jump out of a moving train. They successfully carried out the stunt, but Wallach was then supposed to place the doll representing the other man on the railroad track so that an incoming train could sever the chains that bound them together.
Wallach placed the rather heavy doll on the tracks and remained beside it in the prone position to wait for the train. However, the technicians were unaware of heavy iron steps that jutted out of each train car. Wallach remained on the ground as all cars of the train passed over him; if he had raised his head just once he would have lost his head.
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is an amazing movie. Easily one of the best Westerns ever made, a legendary piece of cinematic history… but few people know that in making the film, director Sergio Leone seemed almost hell-bent on killing one of the movie’s main characters, poor Eli Wallach who only through some divine intervention seems to have made it to the end alive. In the end, his legendary luck prevailed and Eli lived until 2015, dying at the age of 98.