Remembering Forest Hill High grad who went on to be a stuntwoman and 'Jaws' first victim

Editor's note: The Forest Hill High graduate, once nationally ranked swimmer and the stunt woman famous for being Jaws' first victim, Susan Backlinie has died at the age of 77. The New York Times is among the new outlets that have confirmed she died from a heart attack suffered Saturday, May 11, at her home in California. Many of the national outlets, when reporting her death, have turned to an interview Backlinie gave to The Palm Beach Post on the 40th anniversary of the movie "Jaws" in 2015. Following is the story as originally published.

BY STACI STURROCK

When Steven Spielberg began casting “Jaws” in early 1974, he envisioned a New York City actress for the role of the skinny-dipper killed in the opening minutes of the movie.

But what would become an iconic role in the summer blockbuster that opened on June 20, 1975 — 42 years ago — would go to a West Palm Beach-bred stunt woman who seemed born to play the part.

Her name was Susan Backlinie, and she was not only tall, blonde and curvaceous — but, more importantly, a nationally ranked swimmer who’d performed as a mermaid and animal trainer after graduating from Forest Hill High School in 1964.

“The first thing (Spielberg) said to me was, ‘When your scene is done, I want everyone under the seats with the popcorn and bubblegum,” Backlinie says from the 42-foot Mary Frances, the houseboat she shares with her husband in Ventura, Calif. “So I think we did that.”

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A native of Washington, D.C., Backlinie — then Susan Myers — moved to West Palm Beach at the age of 10 and grew up splashing in the Palm Beach County surf and logging mile after mile in local pools. At Forest Hill High, where she was a cheerleader and a state freestyle champ, her classmates voted her “Most Athletic.”

She attended nursing school for a year but discovered that kind of white cap wasn’t for her. “I needed something more athletic and more outdoorsy,” she says.

She swam as a mermaid at Weeki Wachee Springs on Florida’s west coast and worked with wild animals at Ivan Tors Studios, the Miami facility made famous by Flipper. On a national tour with Ivan Tors, she shared the stage with Gentle Ben the bear, Judy the chimp and Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion.

When Ivan Tors closed, Backlinie relocated to California with Africa U.S.A., and was shooting on location with a tiger in Canada when the “Jaws” team reached out to her.

She met Spielberg in the spring of 1974 and made her pitch: “I said, ‘If you use me, you could get close-ups during the stunt itself. If you use an actress, she’ll have to hide her face’.”

Spielberg would soon learn that Backlinie was more at home in the water than his notoriously glitchy mechanical shark.

In the Biography channel’s “Jaws: The Inside Story” documentary, Spielberg calls Backlinie’s sequence “one of the most dangerous” stunts he’s ever directed: “She was actually being tugged left and right by 10 men on one rope and 10 men on the other back to the shore, and that’s what caused her to move like that.”

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Backlinie was wearing a pair of cut-off jeans that had metal plates stitched into the sides. Cables were attached to each plate, putting the stunt woman at the center of a violent tug of war.

“As I would feel my hips go to one side, I would just throw my arms in the opposite direction as hard as I could,” she says. “I also had a pair of fins on because when they would pull me to one side, I would go under, so I had to kick with all my strength to stay above the water. It took a lot of energy, but I was in pretty good shape back then.”

Between takes, Spielberg hung off an inner tube next to Backlinie, and he was at her side when she re-recorded her screams in the studio.

“He sat me in a chair with a bassinet in my lap, and he poured water down my throat,” she says. “Richard Dreyfuss told someone, ‘You know she was getting waterboarded.' ”

Backlinie reprised her “Jaws” work for laughs in “1941,” Spielberg’s 1979 war parody, when she played a skinny-dipper surprised by a Japanese submarine.

She retired from stunt work in the mid-1980s but still appears at movie conventions like the one she’s attending this weekend near Boston. “One of the main comments I get from everybody is, ‘You know you kept me out of the water’.”

Backlinie, however, never feared the ocean or its creatures. She swam with sharks off the coast of Australia and enjoyed scuba diving for many years. “So it didn’t really bother me. But I was always aware.”

And in case you’re wondering, she doesn’t need a bigger boat. The Mary Frances suits her just fine.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Remembering 'Jaws' stuntwoman, Forest Hill High grad, Susan Backlinie