This is Cary Grant back flipping down a hallway in Holiday (not an underpaid stunt double in a suit- Grant spent his teenage years as a member of Bob Pender’s troupe of boy acrobats where he learned, among other things, acrobatics, mime, and stilt-walking).
If that’s not enough to motivate you to see the most underrated of all the Hepburn/Grant comedies, I’m afraid there’s nothing else I can do for you.
Jeannie Epper, Wonder Woman stunt double, with her Wonder Woman acting double Lynda Carter (1976)
“There’s not any one thing I can say about why I love it. It’s not for the paycheck. It 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.”
-Jeannie Epper
It’s no exaggeration to say that for nearly as long as there have been movies where cowboys fall off horses, or cars get flipped, or bad guys get set on fire, there have been Eppers. By the family’s best reckoning there have been 15 Eppers who have risked their necks in the film industry since the 1930s. A couple dozen more if you count in-laws and cousins. Like Daleys in Chicago politics, or Mannings in pro football, the stunt business is a dynastic one. They’re simply born into it.
The Eppers may not be the most famous stuntpeople in Hollywood, or the flashiest, but their roots undoubtedly go the deepest. If you watch an old Western with Gary Cooper doing a fancy dismount from a horse, you’re watching an Epper. When you see Janet Leigh being stabbed in the shower in Psycho, the killer’s hand is an Epper’s. Kathleen Turner being swept down a mudslide in Romancing the Stone? An Epper. That bus ripped apart in the Transformers movie? Take a wild guess who was behind the wheel. This paragraph could go on all day.
Jeannie Epper did her first professional stunt at 9 (1950): She rode a horse bareback down a cliff. Now, 57 years later, she’s considered by many to be the greatest stuntwoman who’s ever lived. Earlier this year, she was the first woman to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Oscars of the stunt world, the Taurus World Stunt Awards. Right before they began the tribute, a procession of nearly a hundred stuntwomen walked on stage. All of them owed their careers to Jeannie.
Originally published in the Los Angeles Times (1975), with the following caption:
“It wasn’t a plane. It wasn’t a bird. It wasn’t even Wonder Woman. It was a stunt. On Monday, stuntwoman Kitty O’Neil plunged from atop the Valley Hilton in Sherman Oaks into an inflated air bag at the pool deck, as the scene was being filmed for an upcoming two-hour special episode of the Wonder Woman series.
A Warner Brothers spokeswoman said Miss O’Neil, who is deaf, established a new high fall record and broke her own previous mark of 120 feet. After the leap, she rode to the airport for a return flight to Bonneville, Utah, where she’s attempting to set a new world land speed record* in her jet powered car.”
*1/4 of a mile in 3.22 seconds at 396 mph
Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928, dir. Charles Reisner)
Keaton’s most famous gag occurred in Steamboat Bill, Jr., in which the facade of a house falls on top of him & he survives because he is standing exactly where the open attic window falls. Keaton declined to rehearse the stunt before shooting the scene because, as he explained, he trusted his set-up, so why waste a wall?
Excerpted from Marion Meade’s Buster Keaton:
“As he stood in the studio street waiting for a building to crash on him, he noticed that some of the electricians and extras were praying. The window was just big enough to give two inches of clearance on either side. Keaton drove a nail in the ground to mark his position. When the moment came and the house front came down, he froze. The open window hit him exactly as planned. Afterward, he would call the stunt one of his greatest thrills. He said later that he did not care whether he lived or died: ‘I was mad at the time, or I never would have done the thing.’”
Scene on youtube here, entire movie online at Internet Archive here.
