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.”
He broke both of his legs on three occasions — the first time in “Breakout” (1975), while jumping from a helicopter in place of Mr. Bronson.
“I was getting ready for the stunt,” Mr. Yerkes recalled in a video interview with Movieguide in 2016. “The guy said, ‘Break a leg.’ And I broke them both.”
Known as a stuntman’s stuntman — he once doubled for Super Dave Osborne, a fictional stuntman portrayed by the comedian Bob Einstein — Mr. Yerkes “was always the first guy you’d try to get when you needed someone up high,” Bob Gale, a writer of “Back to the Future” (with its director, Robert Zemeckis), told Total Film magazine.
In “Angels and Demons” (2009), Mr. Yerkes, playing a cardinal, was set on fire while hanging in the air. He doubled for Mr. Schwarzenegger while swinging like Tarzan across Los Angeles’s Sherman Oaks Galleria Mall to evade capture in “Commando” (1985).
Mr. Yerkes practiced for his roles in the backyard of his home in Northridge, which was equipped with a circus swing for acrobatic jumps, a 40-foot-high platform for falls, and airbags for safe landings. He mentored hundreds, perhaps thousands, of performers there.
Mr. Wolfe, of the Stuntmen’s Association, recalled visiting the backyard to practice a stunt he was hired to perform on the television drama “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.”
“It was a high fall scene,” he said. “I was supposed to pretend to get electrocuted and fall off a building. I learned how to do it at Bob’s house.”
Brayton Walter Yerkes, who was known as Bob, was born on Feb. 11, 1932, in Santa Monica, Calif., to Bernice and Howard Berkes and grew up in the Culver City Palms section of Los Angeles. His father was a mechanic.
One afternoon when he was 11, Bob wandered over to Muscle Beach, an outdoor gym in Santa Monica. He wanted to play table tennis. Instead, he met Deforrest Most, a gymnast, known as Moe, who staged impromptu acrobatic performances for beachgoers.
“Wouldn’t you rather do acrobatics?” Mr. Most asked.
“He put me on his shoulders, and I was hooked right away,” Mr. Yerkes told The Los Angeles Times in 2006.
He returned regularly to perform under Mr. Most’s direction. Then, when he was 15, he ran away from home and joined the DeWayne Brothers Circus, which later merged with the Clyde Beatty Circus.
Mr. Yerkes performed on trampolines, teeter boards, trapezes and high wires.
In 1948, he picked up his first stunt role in the romantic comedy “Julia Misbehaves,” starring Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, Peter Lawford and Elizabeth Taylor.
He found more stunt work during breaks between circus seasons, including in “The Three Musketeers” (1948). He doubled as an acrobat entertaining the Roman emperor in Paul Newman’s first film, “The Silver Chalice” (1954).
Mr. Yerkes gradually shifted his focus to full-time stunt work.
In the late 1970s, he found circus work of a different sort — training actors and other famous people in his backyard for performances on the CBS television show “Circus of the Stars.”
Because of the bodily damage caused by falls, flames and the other hazards in his field, many stunt workers retire in their 30s and 40s. Mr. Yerkes continued working well into his 80s; his last credit was in “Killing Hasselhoff” (2017).
Mr. Yerkes married Dorothy Morales, a fifth-generation circus performer, in 1953. They divorced in the 1970s, and she died in 2009. He is survived by their son, Mark.
During his circus days, Mr. Yerkes became deeply religious — a turnabout from his childhood.
“I was reared in an unbelieving home,” he said in “Redeeming the Screens,” a 2016 book about religion in the entertainment industry. “As a young adult, I have to confess I read the Bible planning to denounce the truth of it, but I realized that it had to be inspired by God.”
He formed a Bible-reading group for circus performers. He later served on the board of the Christian Film & Television Commission, which bills itself as being “dedicated to redeeming the values of the mass media.”
He sometimes wondered whether some higher power helped him perform — and survive — as a stuntman as long as he did.
“Many of the stunts I am called to do are dangerous,” he said in “Redeeming the Screens.” “You can see why I depend on God’s grace to get me through.”
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