Ronnie Rondell Jr., the longtime Hollywood stuntman immortalized on fire for the cover of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, has died at the age of 88.
Rondell Jr. died Tuesday at a senior living facility in Missouri, his family announced (via The Hollywood Reporter). No cause of death was provided.
A stuntman and actor with over 200 credits on his filmography, Rondell Jr. is perhaps best known for a single photograph: The iconic cover of Pink Floyd’s 1975 album Wish You Were Here, where he was lit on fire on a Hollywood backlot (Warner Bros. Studios), shaking hands with a man in a suit (Danny Rogers).
“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. said in the documentary Pink Floyd: The Story of Wish You Were Here. “It was pretty easy to do, not too life-threatening, and paid well.”
To capture the photo, conceived by Hipgnosis’ Storm Thorgesen and Audrey Powell, Rondell Jr. was reportedly lit on fire 15 times, as wind and other factors — “There’s a funny thing about fire. When it gets in your face, you’re going to move,” Rondell Jr. added — forced the many attempts.
During the shoot, the flames caused Rondell Jr. to lose an eyebrow and part of his mustache, but the finished product was worth it: Wish You Were Here is routinely hailed as one of the greatest album covers of all time.
“Ronnie was very gracious about it considering… but as far as he was concerned as a professional in the movie industry it was all in a day’s work,” Powell said of Rondell Jr.s contribution.
In a big screen and small screen career that spanned from 1955 to 2003, Rondell Jr. appeared significantly-albeit-anonymously or served as a stunt coordinator in films and shows like Lethal Weapon, Batman & Robin, Twister, The Crow, Predator 2, They Live, The Karate Kid, Commando, and TV’s Charlie’s Angels. While he retired in 2000, he returned for one final film, a chase sequence in 2003’s The Matrix Reloaded, where his son R.A. Rondell served as supervising stunt coordinator.