Longtime Hollywood stuntman Ronnie Rondell Jr., who was best known for being engulfed in flames for the cover of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” album, has died at the age of 88.
The famed stuntman passed away on Tuesday at a senior living facility in Osage Beach, Missouri, according to Rondell’s family, per The Hollywood Reporter.
A cause of death has yet to be disclosed.
Rondell Jr.’s decades-long career saw the star appearing in several films, including “How the West Was Won” (1962), “Lethal Weapon” (1987), and “The Matrix Reloaded” (2003). But to music fans, he was most remembered as the man who was set on fire on the cover of Pink Floyd’s 1975 album, “Wish You Were Here.”
The memorable image was shot on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, California, and features a half burning Rondell Jr. shaking hands with fellow stuntman Danny Rogers, with both dressed in business suits.
“I’d been doing a lot of fire work in those days, and I had the special suits and all this stuff for fully enveloped fire,” Rondell Jr. recalled in the documentary “Pink Floyd: The Story of Wish You Were Here” (via Rolling Stone). “It was pretty easy to do, not too life-threatening, and paid well.”
The legendary photo took around 15 attempts to shoot due to wind and other factors — and even resulted in Rondell Jr. having part of his eyebrow and mustache burned off.
“We repeated the process 14 times, took the shot, and then on the 15th a gust of wind blew up and wrapped the fire around his face and burnt him,” Aubrey Powell, of the English art design group Hipgnosis, told The Guardian in 2020. “He threw himself to the ground and his whole team piled on blankets to put him out.”
“I knew I had got a special picture,” he continued. “It took a long time to persuade Ronnie to stand exactly as I wanted but in the end he was very brave and it was a perfect composition.”
His other credits includes “Kings of the Sun” (1963), “Shenandoah” (1965), “Grand Prix” (1966), “Diamonds Are Forever” (1971), “Blazing Saddles” (1974), “To Live and Die in L.A.” (1985), “They Live” (1988), “The Hunt for Red October” (1990), “Thelma & Louise” (1991), “Last Action Hero” (1993), “Speed” (1994) and “The Crow” (1994).
Rondell Jr. also worked as a stunt coordinator on multiple Aaron Spelling-produced television series such as “The Rookies,” “S.W.A.T.,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “Fantasy Island,” “Dynasty,” “Vegas,” “Hart to Hart” and “T.J. Hooker,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Rondell Jr. retired from the profession in 2000 but returned to perform in a chase scene for “The Matrix Reloaded” (2003), where his son, R.A. Rondell, was the supervising stunt coordinator.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.pennlive.com ’
