French stunt school's 'badass' women snapped up by film industry

(Reuters) - Valeriane Michelini trained as a dancer before opting to tap into the growing demand for stuntwomen and a career of jumping out of helicopters, leaping from buildings and brawling.

Michelini is one of a growing number of women passing through the Campus Univers Cascade (CUC), which bills itself as the world's biggest stunt school, and looking to break into European cinema and Hollywood as a stunt double.

"I'm used to thriving in a graceful and feminine world," the 29-year-old said between rounds of simulated fights. "And now, I'm in quite the opposite."

Nearly a third of the school's current intake are women.

"It's choreographed, it's calculated, it's technical," Dolle said of the challenges of safely executing dangerous stunts.

Sometimes, the school's women students don't even finish the course before they are snapped up by studios on either side of the Atlantic.

Keeping the talent in France is proving difficult, said the school's parkour trainer Malik Diouf.

It was once commonplace for studios to use stuntmen in wigs instead of female doubles, a practice known as wigging.

In a landmark lawsuit in 2018, U.S. stuntwoman Deven MacNair sued a production company and Hollywood's acting union over dressing up a male double rather than hiring a woman.

Attitudes were evolving, said CUC director Lucas Dollfus.