Ronnie Rondell Jr., a veteran Hollywood stuntman best known for being set on fire for the cover of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album, has died. He was 88.
Rondell Jr. passed away on Tuesday (Aug. 12) at a senior living facility in Osage Beach, Mo., his family announced, according to The Hollywood Reporter. A cause of death was not given.
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Throughout his decades-long career, Rondell Jr. appeared in numerous films, including How the West Was Won (1962), Lethal Weapon (1987) and The Matrix Reloaded (2003). To music fans, however, he is most famously remembered as the man engulfed in flames on the cover of Pink Floyd’s 1975 album, Wish You Were Here.
The striking image was shot on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, Calif., and features a half-burning Rondell Jr. shaking hands with fellow stuntman Danny Rogers, 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 iconic photo, created by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell of the English art design group Hipgnosis, 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,” Powell told The Guardian in 2020. “He threw himself to the ground and his whole team piled on blankets to put him out.”
He added, “I knew I had got a special picture. 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.”
Rondell Jr.’s extensive list of film 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).
He also worked as a stunt coordinator on several Aaron Spelling-produced television series, including The Rookies, S.W.A.T., Charlie’s Angels, Fantasy Island, Dynasty, Vegas, Hart to Hart and T.J. Hooker, according to THR.
Rondell Jr. retired 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.