“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 every of my favourite folks 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 Twenties to Hollywood, the place he opened a using academy and skilled actors who had been showing in westerns, and likewise the place he married Frances Robertson. He acquired 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 ladies and three boys the right way to journey, the right way to soar and, most vital, the right way to roll and the right way to fall.
As a younger teenager, Jeannie was despatched to ending faculty for a number of 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. Along with 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.
Amongst 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 referred to as the Eppers “the Flying Wallendas of movie” and added that in a bar battle scene in “1941,” “there have been Eppers flying everywhere.”
Ms. Epper’s final function 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 special occasion,” Ms. Evans recalled. “She was so excessive and blissful.”
