Jeannie Epper, the grande dame of Hollywood stuntwomen who brawled, crashed, plummeted and was set ablaze during a career covering more than 150 films and television series, including leaping off buildings as “Wonder Woman” and being swept away in a mudslide in the adventure film “Romancing the Stone,” died May 5. She was 83.
The death, at her home in Simi Valley, Calif., was announced by her family, an extended clan of stunt doubles and risk-taking performers whom director Steven Spielberg once called “the Flying Wallendas of film.” No specific cause was mentioned.
Ms. Epper’s work had been seen by hundreds of millions of people since the 1950s, but few outside the entertainment industry were aware of her name or influence.
When Linda Evans’s character Krystle Carrington had catfights with Joan Collins’s Alexis on “Dynasty” in the 1980s, that was Ms. Epper standing in for Evans. In “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean” (1972), Ms. Epper and her sisters, Margo and Stephanie, played hookers who roughed up Paul Newman.
Ms. Epper was Shirley MacLaine’s character in 1983’s “Terms of Endearment” when Jack Nicholson’s stunt double was flung from a Corvette. (Ms. Epper said that was among her favorite scenes.)
In “Wonder Woman,” Ms. Epper was the main stuntwoman to make the leaps, wage the fights and ride the horses for star Lynda Carter in the 1975-1979 series. Deep in a Mexican rainforest, that was Ms. Epper playing Kathleen Turner’s character getting swallowed by a river of mud and swinging on a vine across a 350-foot gorge in 1984’s “Romancing the Stone.” (Just being in the jungle was actually more unnerving for Ms. Epper, who hated spiders or snakes.)
For more than two generations — as film and TV became more action driven, and often more violent — Ms. Epper helped lead the growing contingent of stuntwomen by taking on more challenging scenes and sharing her tricks on how to throw a punch or smash through a prop window.
“When I’m in the moment, the adrenaline takes over,” she told Variety. “Sometimes the next morning,” she added, “my body talks to me.”
She made those remarks in 2007 after receiving a lifetime achievement award from the Taurus World Stunt Awards, becoming the first woman selected for the honor. She was in her mid-60s at the time, but still had more than a decade of work ahead of her. She had endured countless scrapes and bruises and muscle tears by then. Her knees had taken a beating. Yet nothing had ever knocked her out of the game for too long.
She described her near misses like a bullfighter might talk about the bull — part of the job.
There was the time on the set of “Wonder Woman” when she got hypothermia and nearly drowned in a scene with dolphins. She said a dolphin grabbed her arm and brought her to the surface. “That probably was pretty scary,” she said.
She needed dozens of stitches to close a head wound after getting whacked by a picture frame during a fight scene in the blaxploitation film “Foxy Brown” (1974). “The cameraman loved it. I had blond hair, the blood was running down, they kept the camera right on me,” she recalled.
And while making the TV Western series “Lancer” (1968-1970), Ms. Epper stood in for an actress whose character clutched a doll while trapped in a burning cabin. She said the director told her to never let go of the doll. The fire got out of hand.
“When I woke up in the hospital, all my hair was burned off,” Ms. Epper recalled to Entertainment Weekly, “but I still had that little doll in my hands. You should have seen that doll, too. It was all fried up. We both were.”
Even as computer imaging increasingly took the place of stunt actors, Ms. Epper predicted the human risk factor will always have a draw. “I think we still have that thirst from the gladiator days,” she said. “If you know it’s all going to be safe, who’s going to hold their breath watching a stunt?”
Jean Luann Epper was born Jan. 27, 1941, in Glendale, Calif., and was raised on a ranch in North Hollywood. Her parents were professional stunt performers who trained their children — Jeannie, her two sisters and three brothers — in horse-riding tricks and techniques such as learning to roll safety from a fall.
Her father, John Epper, had served in the Swiss cavalry and found his way into show business by chance. He was delivering items to an MGM lot just as a director was desperate for someone to leap a horse over a Packard. John Epper volunteered and did it on the first try. He eventually did stunts as doubles for actors including Gary Cooper, Ronald Reagan and Errol Flynn.
“There was a saying around Hollywood that the Epper kids were born with elbow and knee pads,” Ms. Epper said.
After school, young Jeannie and her sibling raced their horses alongside moving trains and made leaps onto the cars. When they were older, they practiced stunt driving with rental cars. Soon, the rental companies banned the Eppers.
Jeannie’s first time on camera came when she was 9, galloping a horse bareback down a steep slope for a television Western. She had entered what amounted to a near family monopoly on professional stunt work.
The hand with the knife slashing Janet Leigh in the shower in 1960’s “Psycho” was Ms. Epper’s sister Margo. The people clinging for their lives or falling to their doom in “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972) and “The Towering Inferno” (1974) included Ms. Epper and most of her family.
Ms. Epper had her first film credit on the Western drama “Cheyenne Autumn” (1964) directed by John Ford. On the 1960s TV series “The Big Valley,” she stepped in as stunt double on occasion for Barbara Stanwyck.
At one time, “you couldn’t walk onto a movie set and not see one of us,” Ms. Epper said.
Yet the work for female stunt doubles was limited. Many directors stuck with male stunt performers to play actresses, using distant shots and other camerawork to hide any giveaways. That began to change in the 1970s. “Actresses didn’t want hairy-legged boys as doubles,” Ms. Epper said. “They wanted pretty girls. It slowly started changing the order of things.”
After debuting on “Wonder Woman,” Ms. Epper became a fixture on other shows of the era: stunt double for Lindsay Wagner on “The Bionic Woman” (1976-1978), for Kate Jackson on “Charlie’s Angels” and for Angie Dickinson on “Police Woman” (1974-1978).
In films, she was a stalker in scenes for Jessica Walter in “Play Misty for Me” (1971), rode the rails as a double for Jill Clayburgh in the comedy “Silver Streak” (1976) and battled dystopian bad guys as stunt stand-in for Nancy Allen in “RoboCop” (1987).
A 2004 documentary that featured Ms. Epper and stuntwoman Zoë Bell, “Double Dare,” included Spielberg recounting a bar fight scene from his 1979 wartime comedy “1941” that had Ms. Epper and her extended family as part of the action.
“There were Eppers flying all over the place,” he said. “There were Eppers coming in from screen left, Eppers coming in from screen right, they were everywhere.”
Ms. Epper’s marriages to Wes Fuller, Richard Spaethe and Lee Sanders ended in divorce. A son, Kurtis Ray Sanders, died in 2017. Survivors include her husband, Tim Kimick; two children, Eurlyne Epper and Richard Epper, both in the stunt business; five grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren. In 2000, Ms. Epper donated a kidney to actor Ken Howard, whose wife Linda Fetters Howard was a stuntwoman.
After decades of stunts, one of Ms. Epper’s most serious injuries came when the cameras weren’t rolling. On the set of the futuristic drama “Waterworld” (1995), she was on a slide when it collapsed. She fell 14 feet, leaving her back and knee injured and needing weeks of recovery.
“It goes with the territory,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “But if I’m going to get hurt, I’d rather do it for the camera.”
