{"id":90543,"date":"2025-08-17T23:06:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-17T23:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/90543\/"},"modified":"2025-08-17T23:06:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-17T23:06:13","slug":"ronnie-rondell-pink-floyds-wish-you-were-here-stuntman-dead-at-88","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/90543\/","title":{"rendered":"Ronnie Rondell, Pink Floyd&#8217;s &#8216;Wish You Were Here&#8217; Stuntman, Dead at 88"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \">\n\tRonnie Rondell Jr., the longtime Hollywood stuntman immortalized on fire for the cover of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/t\/pink-floyd\/\" id=\"auto-tag_pink-floyd\" data-tag=\"pink-floyd\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Pink Floyd<\/a>\u2019s Wish You Were Here, has died at the age of 88.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \">\n\tRondell Jr. died Tuesday at a senior living facility in Missouri, his family announced (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/movies\/movie-news\/ronnie-rondell-jr-dead-stuntman-pink-floyd-1236346066\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">via The Hollywood Reporter<\/a>). No cause of death was provided.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \">\n\tA 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\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \">\n\t\u201cI\u2019d been doing a lot of fire work in those days, and I had the special suits and all this stuff for fully enveloped fire,\u201d Rondell Jr. said in the documentary Pink Floyd: The Story of Wish You Were Here. \u201cIt was pretty easy to do, not too life-threatening, and paid well.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \">\n\tTo capture the photo, conceived by Hipgnosis\u2019 Storm Thorgesen and Audrey Powell, Rondell Jr. was reportedly lit on fire 15 times, as wind and other factors \u2014 \u201cThere\u2019s a funny thing about fire. When it gets in your face, you\u2019re going to move,\u201d Rondell Jr. added \u2014 forced the many attempts.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \">\n\tDuring 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.<\/p>\n<p>\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \">\n\t\u201cRonnie was very gracious about it considering\u2026 but as far as he was concerned as a professional in the movie industry it was all in a day\u2019s work,\u201d Powell said of Rondell Jr.s contribution.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \">\n\tIn 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 &amp; Robin, Twister, The Crow, Predator 2, They Live, The Karate Kid, Commando, and TV\u2019s Charlie\u2019s Angels. While he retired in 2000, he returned for one final film, a chase sequence in 2003\u2019s The Matrix Reloaded, where his son R.A. Rondell served as supervising stunt coordinator.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ronnie Rondell Jr., the longtime Hollywood stuntman immortalized on fire for the cover of Pink Floyd\u2019s Wish You&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":90544,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[88,45482,13441,61771,61772],"class_list":["post-90543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-obit","tag-obituary","tag-pink-floyd","tag-rsx"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90543\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}