R.I.P. legendary wrestler and stunt performer Gene LeBell

Gene LeBell has died. A legend among martial artists and Hollywood stunt performers, LeBell reportedly worked on as many as 1,000 productions across his long career in stunts, bringing to bear skills honed in his life as a practitioner of both catch wrestling and judo. Among other things, LeBell’s time working with Bruce Lee on the set of the The Green Hornet in the 1960s served as partial inspiration for Brad Pitt’s character Cliff Booth in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood. (Although the duo’s relationship was far warmer in real life than what’s depicted in Tarantino’s film.) Per Deadline, LeBell was 89.

LeBell’s life was a colorful one, with many of the details gleaned from his own authorized autobiography, The Godfather Of Grappling, which he wrote with biographers Bob Calhoun, George Foon, and Noelle Kim and published in 2005. (LeBell is also listed as author or co-author on a number of other books, mostly martial arts manuals.) Born to wrestling promoter “Red Head” Aileen Eaton in the 1930s, LeBell got into wrestling early, eventually expanding his repertoire to include judo, and traveled to Japan to study at the famed Kodokan Judo Institute. Returning to the States, he fought in amateur judo leagues for a time before getting back into the family business of wrestling. Along with his brother Mike LeBell, he wrestled for several years, before moving into the promotional side of the sport, running a promotion in Los Angeles for several years.

Meanwhile, LeBell began making inroads into Hollywood. His first credited role was as a “hood” on The Adventures Of Ozzie & Harriet in 1961; his other on-camera roles would typically come with similarly non-descript and thug-adjacent names—although he also carved out a niche for himself as a go-to referee for TV shows and films going for a bit of verisimilitude when depicting wrestling matches. On the stunt side of things, he worked extensively from the 1960s up through the turn of the millennium; if a TV show needed someone to take a fall or a punch at some point in the second half of the 20th century, there’s a decent chance Gene LeBell passed through its set at least once.

Along the way, his list of big-name collaborators, students, and opponents became as packed as his CV; in addition to Lee, LeBell also worked with everyone from Chuck Norris to protégé Ronda Rousey, plus John Wayne, Elvis Presley, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and many more . He was also, to quote Deadline, the subject of a possibly apocryphal story about a conflict between him and Steven Seagal on the set of the film Out For Justice that “does not end well for Seagal”—which is a nice way of saying that LeBell (who, with a wrestler’s inveterate instinct for a good story, doesn’t seem to have ever explicitly denied this, although Seagal certainly has) supposedly put the actor in a chokehold brutal enough that it led him to, uh, “not end well” his pants.

And while that’s not the entirety of the legacy of Gene LeBelle—who seems to have been well-loved on TV and movie sets, and who wore nicknames like “the toughest man alive” with pride—it is part of what made him such a legendary and colorful figure in Hollywood history. (And here’s where we should probably, briefly, get into the other big similarity between him and Hollywood’s Cliff Booth: LeBell was tried for murder in 1979, for the death of private investigator Robert Duke Hall. He was acquitted of murder in the case, but convicted on being an accessory, with the latter charge ultimately overturned on appeal. Looking at his credits from that time, it doesn’t appear to have interrupted his career as much as one might expect.)

LeBell reportedly died on Tuesday. He was remembered today by a number of his long-time collaborators, including Rousey, Norris, and more.