'The nicest guy I've ever met:' Austin actor and stuntman dies at 89

Gary Kent, longtime Austin actor, director and stuntman — one of several models for Brad Pitt's Oscar-winning performance in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" — died May 25 at the Onion Creek Nursing and Rehabilitation Center at age 89.

"Gary often played bad guys on screen," said Joe O'Connell, an Austin writer, editor and director who has contributed stories to the American-Statesman in the past. "In person, he was the nicest guy I've ever met. He paid attention to people when they spoke, and he seemed to care. He really empathized."

Kent was born June 7, 1933, in Walla Walla, Wash. He played sports in high school and at the University of Washington, where he served as backup quarterback for coach Darrell Royal.

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After a stint in the U.S. Navy Air Force, he acted, directed and wrote for Corpus Christi and Houston theater companies.

In Corpus, he met and married Joyce Peacock. They reared three children, Greg, Colleen and Andy.

In 1958, Kent moved his family to Los Angeles. Almost immediately, he was appearing in dozens of low-budget B-movies such as "Battle Flame" (1959), "The Thrill Killers" (1964), the original "The Black Klansman" (1966) and "The Savage Seven" (1968).

He worked with a range of talents, including Penny Marshall and Peter Bogdanovich.

By 1965, the actor had also become a stuntman. He doubled for Jack Nicholson in director Monte Hellman’s “Ride in the Whirlwind” and “The Shooting.”

Kent served as stunt double for Bruce Dern in "Psych Out," for which he dropped acid to see what it was like. In 2018, he told the Statesman about the experience.

“I had never done acid at that point, so I had no idea what the trip should be,” Kent said. "So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll take acid and see what it’s like; then I’ll know.' I sat in a chair, and they gave me a pill.

“I was sitting there for a long time, just nothing was happening, and thought, ‘This is really boring,’” Kent continued. “I was in a red chair, and when I stood up and lifted my arm up, all of the red from the chair was clinging to my arm and just dripped down on the floor.”

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Besides this hallucination, Kent also shared a story about a particularly risky stunt that he performed in that movie.

“I had to climb into this building and hang by my hands on the edge of this glass dome at this old art museum in L.A.,” Kent told the Statesman. “I had to hang by my hands and swing onto this balcony, and because of where the camera was, they couldn’t put any pads down. I barely made it.”

After his first marriage dissolved, Kent married and later separated from actress Rosemary Gallegy. They raised three children, Michael, Alex and Chris.

Kent's adventures and misadventures over the course of a five-decade career were shared in his memoir, "Shadows and Light: Journeys with Outlaws in Revolutionary Hollywood," and in O'Connell's documentary, "Danger God."

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One of his famous tales involved a tangle with the Charles Manson "family" over a broken dune buggy on the Spahn Movie Ranch. The sequence was reenacted in Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood."

Drawn to Texas after a movie project fell apart in Dallas, Kent wrote and directed the 1976 movie "The Pyramid," which has landed on lists of cult classics.

While working on that film, he met actor Tomi Barrett, a Texan. After Kent and Barrett married, they moved to Austin in 1981. She died of cancer in 2005.

Late in his career, Kent managed movie stunts that were mostly completed in CGI. He remarked that he had outlived the golden age of Hollywood stunts.

O'Connell met Kent at a conference for writing agents.

"He was sharply dressed, silvery white mustache and hair to match," O'Connell told the Statesman. "I started talking to this guy. I went back home and talked to my then girlfriend, now wife. I thought, 'I've got to track this guy down and write about him,' and just kind of got sucked into his world. Somebody had to make a documentary about him. I guess that was me."

O'Connell told the Los Angeles Times: “Gary is the guy that guys wanted to hang out with. And women wanted to be near. Even as an old guy, he was just great. He just radiated a joy of life.”

A memorial will be held 11:30 a.m. Sunday at the AFS Cinema.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Hollywood stuntman and longtime Texas actor, director Gary Kent dies