General
Bob Yerkes, Bruised but Durable Hollywood Stuntman, Dies at 92
A body double to the stars, he performed sometimes bone-breaking feats in movies like “Return of the Jedi” and “Back to the Future.” And he was still at it in his 80s.
Bob Yerkes, who was set on fire, thrown down stairs and hurled from skyscrapers, bridges and trains during a nearly 70-year career in Hollywood as a stunt double for Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charles Bronson and other big-screen stars, died on Oct. 1 in Northridge, Calif. He was 92.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Tree O’Toole, a former stuntwoman who had been his caretaker. He had recently been ill with pneumonia.
Though he was virtually unknown to audiences, Mr. Yerkes was a Tinseltown legend.
In the 1980s alone, he flew through the air as Boba Fett in “Return of the Jedi,” hung from a clock tower as Christopher Lloyd’s character in “Back to the Future” and clung to scaffolding atop the Statue of Liberty in “Remo Williams.”
“He is one of the few stuntmen I would say have celebrity status in the stunt business,” Jeff Wolfe, the president of the Stuntmen’s Association of Motion Pictures, said in an interview. “His lack of fear was kind of renowned.”
Mr. Yerkes (rhymes with “circus”) performed stunts in the films “The Towering Inferno” (1974), “Poltergeist” (1982), “Ghostbusters” (1984) and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (1988), as well as on television in “Gilligan’s Island,” “Wonder Woman,” “Starsky and Hutch” and “Dukes of Hazzard.”
He was concussed more times than he could remember.
“I’m better now, though,” he said in a 2016 video produced by My Gathering Place International, a religious organization. “It used to be that when I’d talk, I wouldn’t finish a sentence.”
