[5] At age 27, the blonde, 5 ft 3 in-tall (160 cm) Shanley was hired as the stunt double for Dorothy Lamour in The Hurricane (1937).
[9] She also doubled for Jane Powell, Olivia de Havilland, Ida Lupino, Veronica Lake, Joan Fontaine, Frances Dee, and Sonja Henie.
[12] In the graduation party scene in It's a Wonderful Life, she fell into a swimming pool that lay underneath the retractable floor of a high school gymnasium.
[13] In Unconquered, she and stuntman Ted Mapes rode a canoe on the rapids then jumped out to grasp an overhanging tree limb;[14] she also sustained an attack of "flaming arrows" in the same film.
[10] She had also "jumped out of bombers, been chased by lions, clawed by tigers, and thrown overboard into icy ocean waters at night", and served as the target for a knife-and-hatchet-thrower.
It credited her long and injury-free career to her conditioning program, which involved swimming 50 laps daily and playing beach volleyball.
[9] Shanley died from heart failure on November 15, 1996, aged 86, at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica.