Jeannie Epper, the peerless, fearless stunt performer who doubled Lynda Carter on Wonder Woman and swung on a vine across a 300-foot gorge and plunged through an epic mudslide while Kathleen Turner in Romanticize the stone, has passed away. She was 83.
Epper died Sunday evening of natural causes at her Simi Valley home, her family said The Hollywood Reporter.
Just one member of a dynasty of stunt performers Steven Spielberg sometimes called the 'Flying Wallendas of Film' – starting with her father, John Epper, there have been four generations of Eppers in show business since the 1930s – she worked on more than 150 films and TV shows during an astonishing career of 70 years.
In 2007, Epper received the first lifetime achievement award given to a woman at the World Taurus Awards and is ranked among the greatest stuntwomen of all time.
Known for her agility, riding skills and competitiveness, the 6-foot-2 Epper also replaced Linda Evans on the ABC shows The Great Valley in the sixties and Dynasty in 1980. When Evans' Krystle was doing one of those things knock down, drag out cat fights of Joan CollinsAlexis, chances are you saw Epper mixing it up.
Epper also put herself in danger for Kate Jackson Charlie's angelsfor Lindsay Wagner The bionic womanfor Angie Dickinson Police womanfor Jessica Walter in Play Misty for me (1971), for Jill Clayburgh Silver stripe (1976) and for Nancy Allen in RoboCop (1987).
Epper was involved in a fire and ended up in the hospital after a stunt went wrong on an episode of the 1968-70 ABC series Lancerand she suffered a serious head injury when she was smashed with a heavy picture frame during a bar fight Pam Grier in Foxy Brown (1974).
About the latter: “The cameraman loved it. I had blonde hair, the blood was pouring down, they kept the camera pointed right at me,” she said told Daan Rather for a CBS Sunday morning segment in 1979.
In 2000, she donated a kidney, possibly saving the life of a close friend Ken Howard. “It's very humiliating when someone gives you part of themselves to keep you alive,” says the actor said three years later. “Thankful doesn't quite seem to make it.”
Epper served as Carter's main stunt double Wonder Womanaired on ABC and CBS from 1975-79 (Debbie Evans and Kitty O'Neil were among those who were also suitable for the star). She learned to imitate Carter's running gait and performed most of the superhero's fights signature jump on the show.
Jeannie Epper (left) doubled for Lynda Carter on 'Wonder Woman.'
With thanks to the Epper family
Epper spent about eleven weeks in a remote Mexican rainforest Romanticize the stone (1984), with Turner and Michael Douglas. She rehearsed the mudslide scene with Douglas' stunt double, Vince Deadrick Jr., two or three times a day for a few weeks.
When Deadrick once ended up with his head between her open legs in a mud puddle at the bottom of the slide, Director Robert Zemeckis decided to transfer that to the movie, and it made for one of the funniest moments of the movie.
Before her journey through the canyon, stunt coordinator Terry Leonard attached the cable used in the stunt to a tree, he explained Unpleasant Entertainment weekly in 2007.
“And when we did a test, the tree just popped out of the ground because it had rained so much in Mexico. It crashed into the gorge,” he recalls. “Something like that will take away your self-confidence pretty quickly. But Jeannie, she just stepped up and did it when it was time.
Jean Luann Epper, one of six children – three girls and three boys – was born in Glendale on January 27, 1941, and raised in North Hollywood. Will Rogers' horse, Trigger, was stabled just down the street from the family home on Longridge Avenue.
Her charismatic father was a former officer in the Swiss cavalry, who served, among other things Gary Cooper (The Westerner), Errol Flynn (The attack of the Light Brigade), Randolph Scott (Western Union) And Ronald Reagan (Santa Fe Trail) in more than 200 films. Her mother, Frances, was a housewife.
When she was 9, Jeannie performed her first stunt, riding a bareback horse off a cliff, and appeared in her first movie, Elopement (1951), starring Clifton Webb and Anne Francis. At the age of 13, she left for Switzerland for 2 1/2 years to finish school.
Jeannie Epper and screenwriter Carl Foreman on location for the 1968 film 'Mackenna's Gold'.
Courtesy of Everett Collection
She returned home and received her first credit Cheyenne Fall (1964), directed by John Ford. And during the four seasons of The Great Valleyshe was on set almost every day and also stepped in occasionally Barbara Stanwyck.
This was a time in Hollywood when men would double for women.
“It wasn't until sexy ladies like Linda Evans and Lynda Carter said we didn't want guys with hairy legs doubling for us anymore,” Epper said in a Conversation from 2014 for the website of the TV Academy Foundation The interviews. They said, 'These girls are just as good as the boys, only they have shaved legs and no hairy armpits.'
On Lancerstarring Wayne MaunderEpper replaced an actress whose character held a doll while trapped in a burning cabin. Before the scene, the director told Jeannie, “Whatever you do, don't let go of the doll,” she said. EW. Before she knew it, the burning beams were crashing down all around her.
“When I woke up in the hospital, all my hair had been burned off,” she said, “but I still had that doll in my hands. You should have seen that doll too. It was all fried. We both were.”
All in all, she managed to avoid serious injuries during her career.
In The life and times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), Epper and her two sisters, Margo and Stephanie, played slimy whores who grab and then beat each other up Paul Nieuwman. Later in the film she is seen wearing a red wig jumping on a horse and running out of town.
And in what she said was one of her favorite scenes, she (as Shirley MacLaine's character) threw out Jack Nicholson's double out the top of a Corvette Terms of endearment (1983).
Epper worked for Spielberg (as director or producer) on eight films, among others Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), 1941 (1979), Poltergeist (1982), Catch me if you can (2002) and Minority report (2002).
Her big screen oeuvre was also included Our man Flint (1966), Coffee (1973), Earthquake (1974), The towering inferno (1974), Smokey and the Bandit II (1980), The cannonball run (1981), Blade Runner (1982), Extremities (1986), Outrageous fortune (1987), Road house (1989), Total recall (1990), The refugee (1993), Die hard with vengeance (1995), Con Air (1997), Rush hour 2 (2001), The Italian track (2003), Death Bill: Part 2 (2004), The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006) and The great Spider Man (2012).
At 69, she jumped a car through fire and landed it safely for a 2010 commercial, and was 80 when she received her last stunt credit.
Epper was a founding member of the Stuntwomen's Association of Motion Pictures, founded in 1968, and served as its president in 1999. And in 2004, she and fellow stunt performer Zoë Bell were featured in Amanda Micheli's documentary. Double daringwhich screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Survivors include her fourth husband, Tim; her children, Eurlyne and Richard, both in the stunt business (another son and stuntman, Kurtis, predeceased her); five grandchildren, including Christopher, a stuntman; and seven great-grandchildren.
Her siblings, Tony and Margo – she stood in the window as Mrs. Norma Bates entered Psycho and appeared oh-so briefly in the film's iconic shower scene – Gary, Andy and Stephanie all worked in stunts and died before her.
'You fight along in the bar 1941,” says Spielberg Double daring“Eppers were flying in all directions. There were Eppers coming from the left of the screen, Eppers coming from the right of the screen, they were everywhere.
In Scott McGee's 2022 book Danger on the silver screenEpper says that stunt work “gives me strength, it gives me a sense of great achievement and control… when you, as a woman, accomplish something that only men do, it inspires respect for all women. It opens the door for women to do all kinds of things.”