Many famous movie actors are associated with a particularly punchy line or memorable monologue; some are even synonymous with a single spectacular shot. Susan Backlinie won herself a spot in film history largely on the strength of a single yelp of surprise: At the beginning of Steven Spielberg’s classic thriller Jaws, after the character played by Backlinie ill-advisedly goes on an after-dark skinny-dipping jaunt just off the coast of the Atlantic, Backlinie gasps as she is tugged on by an unseen shark.
So terrifying is this moment — and so identified has it become with the film that surrounds it — that when Turner Classic Movies asked filmmaker Chuck Workman to assemble a montage of great movies from the art form’s first 100 years, he chose Backlinie’s startling expression of shock as the moment that would stand in for the entirety of Jaws. We didn’t need to see any scenes with the stars Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider, or Robert Shaw; all that was required to identify the movie was Backlinie’s iconic reaction to her sudden, shocking encounter with a shark.
Backlinie died on May 11 at age 77. Even allowing for the relative slimness of her resume, it seems obvious that Backlinie may not have had the acting pedigree of the best thespians of the age. Yet it is to her credit that she achieved cinematic immortality thanks to a relatively fleeting scene defined by shock and awe.
Not that Backlinie had spent her early days dreaming of a future career in show business. Born in 1946 in Washington, D.C., Backlinie was as athletic as she appears in Jaws, when, just before the attack, she is seen gracefully sprinting toward the beach while depositing articles of clothing for a male admirer who is straining to catch up to her. After relocating with her family at age 10 to West Palm Beach, Florida, Backlinie immersed herself in aquatics: As a high-schooler, she won the state freestyle swimming championship, and, in her 20s, she gained employment in live shows presented by the studio run by Ivan Tors, responsible for such wildlife-oriented programming as Sea Hunt and movies like Flipper.
When she was up for the part in Jaws, Backlinie argued to Spielberg that there were advantages to having a single performer execute the scene in Jaws, rather than an actress for some shots and a stuntwoman for others. “I said, ‘If you use me, you could get close-ups during the stunt itself,’” Backlinie recalled to the Palm Beach Post in 2015. “‘If you use an actress, she’ll have to hide her face.’”
The scene in Jaws goes on, excruciatingly, beyond the moment when Backlinie first realizes she is under attack: The actress was seemingly being wrenched in every direction by the attacking shark — in reality, the work of stuntmen holding cables that were affixed to plates on Backlinie’s jeans.
“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,” Backlinie told the Palm Beach Post. “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.”
And so she remained: Four years after Jaws, Spielberg coaxed Backlinie to return to the water in the director’s hugely unsuccessful (but greatly entertaining) World War II spoof, 1941. In a delirious Mad magazine-style self-parody, Backlinie gallops out to sea, but, this time, her swim is interrupted not by a shark but by a Japanese submarine suspiciously surfacing in American waters.
Her appearance in the still-underestimated 1941 arguably represented the final minute of her 15 minutes of fame, but she had already made a modest career for herself both in front of, and behind, the camera. She turned up in such relatively undistinguished movies as The Grizzly and the Treasure (1975) and Day of the Animals (1977) and on TV series including The Quest, Quark, and The Fall Guy. She also accumulated credits as a stuntwoman and animal trainer. Perhaps her most apropos post-Jaws film appearance was as part of a water ballet in 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper.
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Backlinie retained a healthy perspective (and sense of humor) about the role that came to define her life. “I worked on dive boats many years, and some of the guys I worked with were a lot younger than me,” she recalled in the documentary The Shark Is Still Working. “They would say to me, ‘You know, you were the first woman I ever saw with no clothes on.’ I just laugh. What do you say? … You hope it was a good view.”
Because of its overwhelming box-office success, Jaws instantly became fodder for Hollywood’s sequel machine, but the three spinoffs never came close to equaling the first film’s imagination, intensity, and astonishing ability to petrify. Maybe that’s partly because those movies were missing Susan Backlinie.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.