Epper was one of the most accomplished stuntwomen in Hollywood history.
Jeannie Epper, one of Hollywood’s great stuntwomen, has died. She was 83 years old. During her long career, Epper doubled Lynda Carter on Wonder Woman, Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone, and more than 100 other movies and TV shows. According to The Hollywood Reporter, who first reported her death, Epper passed away at her home in California due to natural causes. She represents the second generation (of four) of Epper to act as stunt performers on film, beginning with her father, John Epper. Filmmaker Steven Spielberg has called the Eppers “the flying Wallendas of film,” a reference to a family of circus daredevils and acrobats.
Epper, whose career spanned nearly 70 years, was the first woman ever to receive a lifetime achievement honor from the World Taurus Awards, a yearly award that celebrates stunt performers in film. Epper worked consistently until 2015, with her final film credit being Hot Pursuit. In 2021, at age 80, she got her final credit, doing stunts for the video game Ground Zero Texas: Nuclear Edition.
Epper is one of the best-known women to work as a stunt performer and, by her own recollection, rose to prominence in part because Hollywood finally stopped using men to double women for stunts in the 1970s.
“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 is quoted as saying in the THR piece. “They said, ‘These girls are just as good as the guys, only they have shaved legs and don’t have hairy armpits.'”
During the course of her long career, Epper appeared in some of the biggest hits in Hollywood. She also cultivated relationships that gave her opportunities to work with the same people again and again, from Spielberg — she worked for him on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), 1941 (1979), Poltergeist (1982), Catch Me If You Can (2002), Minority Report (2002), and others — and Linda Evans. Epper doubled Evans in both The Big Valley, which ran on ABC in the 1960s, and Dynasty in the 1980s.
Other notable roles include Romancing the Stone, in which she famously leapt across a gorge while holding onto a vine; Earthquake (1974), The Towering Inferno (1974), Smokey and the Bandit II (1980), The Cannonball Run (1981), Blade Runner (1982), 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).
Our condolences go out to Epper’s family, friends, colleagues, and fans.
