Their friendship grew and after divorcing Marie Arlene Wheeler in 1973, Needham took up Reynold’s offer to live temporarily in the carriage house of his Holmby Hills estate in Los Angeles. Needham ended up staying there for 12 years. He became Reynolds's stunt double in the early 1960s after they met on the set of the TV series Riverboat. Needham broke into stunt work by accident: he was pruning trees for a living before enlisting in the military as a paratrooper. His most important Hollywood relationship was with Reynolds. He did Fast and Furious -level stuntsin the ’50s and ’60s. He did 10 movies with John Wayne, and says he taught the famously pugnacious Duke “the correct way to throw a punch”. In the next two decades, he filled in as the stunt double for James Stewart, Dustin Hoffman, Dean Martin, Kirk Douglas and Burt Reynolds. His memoir – which has eye-catching chapter titles such as ‘Bullshit Doesn’t Photograph’, ‘From the Outhouse to the Penthouse’ and ‘Busier than a One-Legged Man in an Ass-kicking Contest’ – is full of tales of the movie stars he met after making his debut on a “little bitty movie” in 1961 called The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, which was a vehicle for country music singer Jimmie Rodgers. The characters were inspired by Needham and Reynolds, with Pitt talking publicly about the “epic stories” of Needham, who broke 56 bones – including his back, twice – during his death-defying stunts. In Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Brad Pitt (who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the role) plays military veteran and stuntman Cliff Booth, who is the best friend of movie star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio). His collaborations with friend Burt Reynolds, with whom he made two Smokey and the Bandit films, Hooper, two Cannonball Run movies and Stroker Ace, are the stuff of cinema legend. “They used to call me Squirrel, because I would get on the top of the tree, take off my harness and hang by my toes on a branch 50 feet up in the air.” I would do all kinds of crazy things,” he once said. “I was always pushing the limits, going as far as I could. In the late 1940s Needham began working as a tree-topper, scaling and pruning giant sugar maples in Arkansas. He was taking “crazy” risks as a teenager, long before he was leaping from planes, jumping from high-rise buildings and crashing burning cars in a screen career that would span 310 movies and 4,500 television episodes.
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