As Em Saville’s scooter crashed into a roadside barrier, she was catapulted towards a sheer, 300ft drop. Landing just millimetres from the edge, she lay dazed, bloodied and bruised.
It was the type of scene the 34-year-old had played out many times before in her job as a professional stuntwoman. But unlike the head-on collisions and death-defying falls she was used to, this particular drama involved no rehearsals, no safety-checks and no cameras.
Slumped, helpless, in the Kefalonian sun, Em came round to a view of the Mediterranean sea and the shouts of her friend Emma, who’d been on the back of the scooter. "Don’t worry, I’m fine," Em replied.
In shock, she felt no pain. But then she looked down and saw that her left leg had been very badly damaged. "It had almost been sliced in two," she recalls, "and the bone and calf muscle were exposed.
"Everything seemed to happen in slow motion," she remembers. "I’d warned Emma that we were about to crash, and as I headed towards the cliff drop, I only expected to tap the barrier. But when I opened my eyes and realised how close to the edge I’d landed, I began to worry, then everything hit me. It was awful, nothing like the screen stunts I’d been trained to do. I was out of my depth."
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