Bob Anderson (1922 - 2012)
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I met Bob Anderson at the Collectormania London event held at Earls Court in November 2010.
He signed my masterprint of The Princess Bride, a film for which he planned all of the fight scenes.
Robert James Gilbert Sanderson was born in Hampshire in September 1922. He was educated at the Navy's Royal Hospital School, where he learnt to fence.
In the 1940s, he was a Royal Marine who won interservice fencing championships with all three weapons - foil, epee and sabre. Anderson's speciality was the sabre, a flat-bladed weapon with which points are scored by striking with theside
Bob Anderson signing my Masterprint
the side of the blade. Anderson also fenced for Great Britain at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, and twice in the world championships.
Anderson's cinema career began in 1953 when he was hired as the fight choreographer and stunt double for the Robert Louis Stevenson film The Master of Ballantrae (1953) about a Scottish lord, played by Errol Flynn, who turns to piracy.
Over the next fifty years, Anderson became well-known in Hollywood as a sword master with a reputation as a perfectionist. This earned him the nickname 'Grumpy Bob'.
Anderson worked with Sean Connery on the Bond filmFrom
In the Star Wars films The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and The Return of the Jedi (1983), Anderson appeared on-screen as the evil, black-helmeted Darth Vader in the scenes in which he fights
Bob Anderson was married to Pearl, and they had three children and several grandchildren. Anderson died on New Years Day 2012.
film From Russia With Love (1963); with Ryan O'Neal in Barry Lyndon (1975); with Cary Elwes & Mandy Patinkin in The Princess Bride (1987); with Charlie Sheen, Keifer Sutherland, Oliver Platt & Chris O'Donnell in The Three Musketeers (1993); with Antonio Banderas
Anderson (right) fenced for Great Britain in 1952
Banderas & Catherine Zeta-Jones in The Mask of Zorro (1998) and The Legend of Zorro (2005) and with the director Peter Jackson in the Tolkein adaptation The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). Shortly before his death, he was working on another Tolkein film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012).
Anderson was Darth Vader
in the light sabre fight scenes in Star Wars
fights the young hero Luke Skywalker (played by Mark Hamill) with lightsabres. The uncredited Anderson stepped in as Dave Prowse was not very good with lightsabres.
Bob Anderson
Cary Elwes & Bob Anderson have signed my The Princess Bride masterprint
