Jeannie Epper, Legendary ‘Wonder Woman' and ‘Romancing the Stone' Stuntwoman, Dies at 83
Jeannie Epper, the peerless, fearless stunt performer who doubled for Lynda Carter on Wonder Woman and swung on a vine across a 350-foot gorge and propelled down an epic mudslide as Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone, has died. She was 83.
Epper died Sunday night of natural causes at her home in Simi Valley, her family told The Hollywood Reporter.
Just one member of a dynasty of stunt performers that Steven Spielberg dubbed 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 150-plus films and TV shows during an astounding 70-year career.
In 2007, Epper received the first lifetime achievement honor given to a woman at the World Taurus Awards and ranks among the greatest stuntwomen of all time.
Known for her agility, horse-riding skills and competitiveness, the 5-foot-9 Epper also stepped in for Linda Evans on the ABC shows The Big Valley in the 1960s and Dynasty in the 1980s. When Evans’ Krystle was engaged in one of those knock-down, drag-out catfights with Joan Collins’ Alexis, chances are it was Epper you saw mixing it up.
Epper also put herself in harm’s way for Kate Jackson on Charlie’s Angels, for Lindsay Wagner on The Bionic Woman, for Angie Dickinson on Police Woman, for Jessica Walter in Play Misty for Me (1971), for Jill Clayburgh in Silver Streak (1976) and for Nancy Allen in RoboCop (1987).
Epper was caught in a fire and wound up in the hospital after a stunt went awry on an episode of the 1968-70 ABC series Lancer, and she received a severe head wound when smashed with a heavy picture frame in a barroom brawl with Pam Grier in Foxy Brown (1974).
On the latter, “The cameraman loved it. I had blond hair, the blood was running down, they kept the camera right on me,” she told Dan Rather for a CBS Sunday Morning segment in 1979.
In 2000, she donated a kidney, possibly saving the life of good friend Ken Howard. “It’s very humbling when someone gives you a part of themselves to keep you alive,” the actor said three years later. “Thankful doesn’t seem to quite make it.”
Epper served as Carter’s main stunt double on Wonder Woman, which aired on ABC and CBS from 1975-79 (Debbie Evans and Kitty O’Neil were among those who also suited up for the star). She learned how to mimic Carter’s running gait and did most of the superhero’s fighting and signature jumping on the show.
Jeannie Epper (left) doubled for Lynda Carter on ‘Wonder Woman.’
Epper spent about 11 weeks in a remote Mexican rainforest on Romancing the Stone (1984), starring Turner and Michael Douglas. She rehearsed the mudslide scene with Douglas’ stunt double, Vince Deadrick Jr., two or three times a day for a couple of weeks.
When Deadrick once landed with his head between her open legs in a pool of mud at the bottom of the slide, director Robert Zemeckis decided to carry that over to the movie, and it made for one of the film’s funniest moments.
For her trip across the gorge, stunt coordinator Terry Leonard rigged the cable used in the stunt to a tree, he explained to Entertainment Weekly in 2007.
“And when we did a test, the tree pulled right out of the ground because it had rained so much in Mexico. It went crashing down into the canyon,” he recalled. “Something like that will take away your confidence pretty quickly. But Jeannie, she just stepped up and did it when it was time.”
One of six children – three girls and three boys – Jean Luann Epper was born in Glendale on Jan. 27, 1941, and raised in North Hollywood. Will Rogers’ horse, Trigger, was stabled down the street from the family home on Longridge Avenue.
Her charismatic father was a former officer with the Swiss Cavalry who doubled for the likes of Gary Cooper (The Westerner), Errol Flynn (The Charge of the Light Brigade), Randolph Scott (Western Union) and Ronald Reagan (Santa Fe Trail) in more than 200 movies. Her mother, Frances, was a homemaker.
When she was 9, Jeannie performed her first stunt, riding a horse bareback down a cliff, and appeared in her first film, Elopement (1951), starring Clifton Webb and Anne Francis. At 13, she left for Switzerland for 2 1/2 years at finishing school.
Jeannie Epper and screenwriter Carl Foreman on location on the 1968 film ‘Mackenna’s Gold.’
She returned home and received her first credit on Cheyenne Autumn (1964), directed by John Ford. And during the four-season run of The Big Valley, she was on the set almost every day, also stepping in occasionally for 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 hairy-legged boys doubling for us anymore,” Epper said in a 2014 conversation for the TV Academy Foundation website The Interviews. They said, ‘These girls are just as good as the guys, only they have shaved legs and don’t have hairy armpits.'”
On Lancer, starring Wayne Maunder, Epper stood in for an actress whose character was clutching 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 told EW. Before she knew it, beams on fire were crashing all around her.
“When I woke up in the hospital, all my hair was burned off,” she said, “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.”
All in all, however, she managed to avoid serious injury during her career.
In The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), Epper and her two sisters, Margo and Stephanie, played slimy hookers who grab at and then beat up Paul Newman. Later in the movie, she is seen in a red wig jumping on a horse and getting the heck out of town.
And in what she said was one of her favorite scenes, she (as Shirley MacLaine’s character) ejected Jack Nicholson’s double out of the top of a Corvette in Terms of Endearment (1983).
Epper worked for Spielberg (as director or producer) on eight films, among them Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), 1941 (1979), Poltergeist (1982), Catch Me If You Can (2002) and Minority Report (2002).
Her big-screen body of work also included Our Man Flint (1966), Coffy (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 Fugitive (1993), Die Hard With a Vengeance (1995), Con Air (1997), Rush Hour 2 (2001), The Italian Job (2003), Kill Bill: Vol 2 (2004), The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006) and The Amazing Spider-Man (2012).
When she was 69, she jumped a car through fire and landed it safely for a 2010 commercial and was 80 when she received her final stunt credit.
Epper was a founding member of the Stuntwomen’s Association of Motion Pictures, launched 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 Dare, which 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, Margo – she was in the window as Mrs. Norma Bates in Psycho and appeared in the film’s iconic shower scene oh-so briefly – Gary, Andy and Stephanie all worked in stunts and died before her.
“In the bar fight in 1941,” Spielberg says in Double Dare, “there were Eppers flying all over the place. There were Eppers coming in from screen left, Eppers coming in from screen right, they were everywhere.”
In Scott McGee’s 2022 book Danger on the Silver Screen, Epper is quoted as saying that stunt work “empowers me, it gives me a sense of great accomplishment and control … as a woman, when you pull off something that only men do, it raises respect for all women. It opens the door for women to do all kinds of things.”
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