biography of mandy dickinson

MANDY DICKINSON
Biography

Mandy has worked with husband Leo on all his filming projects since 1981 and now acts as producer for all of their films.

She has done most of the so called adventure sports including scuba, cave-diving and mountaineering but excelled in skydiving where she won a gold medal in the 1989 becoming British Champion with the rest of her team in 4 way formation skydiving. She represented the UK at the World Meet in Spain coming 12th out of 30 teams.

She now has over 2000 jumps to her credit and participated in a number of world record. These have included, first 100 way attempts in Canada, the World record of 126 skydivers in formation in Belgium, the first 80 all female formation in France, then in 1987 the 216 formation in Bratislavia, and the British women’s record on occasions before being on the team for the 300 formation attempts in Russia.

She was in the Guinness book of records for being one of 15 skydivers to jump out of the same balloon at one time, and in 1997 filmed 2 British sky-surfers breaking the altitude record jumping from a balloon at 24,000ft. In addition to this Mandy has acted as a skydiving stunt woman for several TV dramas and commercials. One of these was an aerial wedding where she had to wear a full length wedding dress and veil in freefall.

Other TV appearances include her being the subject of a TVS documentary called ‘What a Woman’ where they made a documentary about her cave-diving in Wookey Hole.

After watching Leo fly over Everest in 1991 and wishing she could have been in the basket, she decided to learn to fly. Now a commercial pilot she intends using these skills for filming purposes. In 2000 she organised the filming of Steve Lennard’s skydiving with Peregrine Falcons for the BBC series ‘Ultimate Killers’.

Not to be left behind, the second time on Everest Mandy climbed above the North Col on the Tibetan side in 1995 whilst filming a TV documentary about Tom Whittaker, a disabled climber attempt to climb Everest with Greg Child.

Mandy’s future exploits will be more in the ballooning field, where there are plenty of records to be broken. She has already achieved the British Womens duration record for a 90,000 cubic foot balloon flying for 10½ hours from Bristol to and was one of 4 people who built a balloon stack of hopper single person balloons.

[About Adventure Archive] [film library] [filming services] [photo library]
[latest projects] [contact us]