EGN NEWS DESK
Jeannie Epper had at the least 100 display roles, possibly even 150 — nobody is kind of positive. But as a result of she was a stunt double, galloping on horseback, crashing vehicles and kicking down doorways for the celebrities of movies and tv reveals, hers was not a family identify.
In her heyday, nevertheless, Ms. Epper was ubiquitous. She hurtled by way of the air most weeks as Lynda Carter’s stunt double on the hit tv collection “Wonder Woman” and mimed Ms. Carter’s leggy lope. She tumbled by way of a scrum of mud and rocks as Kathleen Turner’s double within the 1984 comedy-adventure movie “Romancing the Stone,” which additionally starred Michael Douglas. She threw punches for Linda Evans in one in all her many ballyhooed cat fights with Joan Collins on the frothy long-running Nineteen Eighties nighttime cleaning soap opera “Dynasty.”
And, in what she typically mentioned was her favourite stunt — or gag, to make use of the trade time period — Ms. Epper skidded a Corvette right into a 180-degree flip as Shirley MacLaine’s character in “Terms of Endearment” (1983), neatly hurling Jack Nicholson’s double into the Gulf of Mexico.
Ms. Epper, whose bruising profession spanned 70 years, died on Sunday at her house in Simi Valley, Calif. She was 83.
Her daughter, Eurlyne Epper, confirmed the dying. She mentioned her mom had been in poor health for a while and caught an an infection throughout a latest hospital go to.
Ms. Epper was stunt royalty; her father was John Epper, a Swiss-born grasp horseman who doubled in westerns for Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott and Ronald Reagan. Like her 5 siblings, Ms. Epper joined the household enterprise.
She was simply 9 when she rode a horse bareback down a cliff in her first stunt. Her first movie credit score, nevertheless, as The Hollywood Reporter found, was “Cheyenne Autumn,” a 1964 western directed by John Ford. And she was a daily on the western collection “The Big Valley,” which ran on ABC from 1965 to 1969, typically doubling for Barbara Stanwyck.
“Wonder Woman,” which debuted on ABC in 1976, was a watershed second not only for Ms. Epper but additionally for all girls in her trade. Despite the work of Ms. Epper and others, stunt doubling had lengthy been principally a person’s sport, with males dressing as girls to do their stunts — a observe referred to as wigging. The collection was groundbreaking for that includes a feminine motion hero, as was one other ABC collection, “Charlie’s Angels,” that very same 12 months.
“Actresses didn’t need hairy-legged boys as doubles,” Ms. Epper advised Variety in 2007. “They needed fairly women. It slowly began altering the order of issues.”
The rangy, 5-foot-9 Ms. Epper was used to the tough and tumble of the brotherhood that accepted her due to her father, and likewise as a result of she had her personal moxie. She was savvy concerning the sexism of the stunt world, and the film enterprise.
Zoë Bell, a New Zealand-born actor and stuntwoman whom Ms. Epper mentored, described the recommendation Ms. Epper gave her when she was placing collectively her résumé for a job doubling for Uma Thurman in “Kill Bill: Volume 1,” Quentin Tarantino’s 2003 martial arts splatterfest. (Ms. Bell, a proficient gymnast, had been Lucy Lawless’s double throughout each season of “Xena: Warrior Princess,” which was shot in New Zealand and ran from 1995 to 2001.)
“She requested me what I weighed,” Ms. Bell recalled by telephone. “I mentioned ‘145-ish.’ Jeannie, with out lacking a beat, mentioned ‘OK, so put 130. You look 130 and the actresses all lie.’ She went on to speak about recognizing a damaged system and devising new guidelines that one feels good about, so as to have the ability to hold enjoying the sport.”
Ms. Epper and Ms. Bell have been the joint topics of “Double Dare,” a 2004 documentary directed by Amanda Micheli, which adopted Ms. Epper as she hunted for work in her 60s and Ms. Bell, who was in her early 20s, as her profession was simply taking off.
“Jeannie was up in opposition to the inequity of ladies not getting promoted,” Ms. Micheli mentioned. “The working life span of a stunt performer is transient, like knowledgeable athlete’s. They’re utilizing their our bodies, they’re hitting the bottom on daily basis.
“The finest stuntmales go on to develop into stunt coordinators, and even second-unit administrators, which is a strong position on an motion movie,” she continued. “Jeannie’s brother Gary bought these alternatives, whereas she simply stored hitting a wall. Instead of attending to name the pictures, she was hustling for small jobs right here and there, and taking hits nicely previous her prime. I noticed the ache that brought about her, each figuratively and actually.”
In Ms. Epper’s youth, there have been the same old mishaps. While leaping a horse off a raft in “Mackenna’s Gold” (1969), she practically drowned when the horse floundered and flipped within the water. She was nearly knocked out by Pam Grier within the 1974 blaxploitation movie “Foxy Brown” when Ms. Grier smashed a portray over her head and sliced open her cranium. She caught hearth when a stunt went south in an episode of the late-Sixties tv collection “Lancer.”
The years of stunts principally took their toll in torn ligaments and battered joints. Not that she complained.
“Jeannie was bad-ass and a sweetheart,” Ms. Bell mentioned. “A woman and one of many boys. A cowgirl and a ending faculty graduate. A Christian and one in all my favourite individuals to crack filthy jokes with.”
Jean Luann Epper was born on Jan. 27, 1941, in Glendale, Calif., and grew up in North Hollywood. Her father served within the cavalry in his native Switzerland and moved within the Nineteen Twenties to Hollywood, the place he opened a using academy and educated actors who have been showing in westerns, and likewise the place he married Frances Robertson. He bought into the stunt enterprise when he was delivering a horse to a set and ended up doing the stunt himself — the scene concerned leaping the animal over a automobile. He taught his three women and three boys the way to experience, the way to soar and, most vital, the way to roll and the way to fall.
As a younger teenager, Jeannie was despatched to ending faculty for just a few years in Switzerland — she hated it — and when she returned, she married at simply 16, turned a mom and went to work.
Her marriages to Wes Fuller, Richard Spaethe and Lee Sanders led to divorce. In addition to her daughter, who can also be a stuntwoman, Ms. Epper is survived by her husband, Tim Kimack; her son, Richard; 5 grandchildren; and 7 great-grandchildren.
Among her many different credit, Ms. Epper appeared in eight movies produced or directed by Steven Spielberg, together with “1941,” the 1979 slapstick comedy that imagines an alternate actuality to what occurred within the days after Pearl Harbor. Most of her household was solid in that movie, too. In Ms. Micheli’s documentary, Mr. Spielberg known as the Eppers “the Flying Wallendas of movie” and added that in a bar struggle scene in “1941,” “there have been Eppers flying all over.”
Ms. Epper’s final position was not a stunt, precisely. In 2019, at 78, she was solid as a hostage in an episode of the ABC collection “The Rookie” that concerned being sure, gagged and duct-taped to a chair with a shotgun strapped to her shoulder and pointed at her head.
Debbie Evans, a much-lauded stuntwoman who mentioned she thought of Ms. Epper her “stunt mother,” drove her to the set. “It was a big day,” Ms. Evans recalled. “She was so excessive and joyful.”
