LOS ANGELES — Stuntman and director Hal Needham spoke with a down-home twang but was as Hollywood as air kisses and car chases – and had the scars to prove it.

In a career that spanned hundreds of TV episodes and feature films, he tumbled down cliffs, leaped off boulders, jumped from planes, tottered off balconies and plummeted from towers. He was rattled in blasts, was blistered in fires and broke 56 bones, including his back, twice.

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Hal Needham was honored in 2012 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which called him “an innovator, mentor and master technician.” McClatchy Newspapers

But he maintained a sunny outlook, even after plunging into the unknown territory of film directing.

“I can go back and fall on my head any time,” he told an interviewer in 1979.

Needham, 82, a legendary Hollywood stuntman before becoming the director of frothy, adrenaline-pumped films including “Smokey and the Bandit” and “The Cannonball Run,” died Friday in Los Angeles, said a family spokesman, who declined to give the cause of death.

In 2012, Needham received a Governor’s Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The academy, which gives no Oscars for stunt work, cited Needham as “an innovator, mentor and master technician who elevated his craft to an art and made the impossible look easy.”

Needham helped design a number of devices aimed at making stunts both safer and more spectacular, including a pressure-plate gizmo that could hurl an actor into the air as a car seemed to hit him or an explosion went off nearby. In 1986, he and collaborator William L. Frederick received the academy’s Scientific and Engineering Award for developing the Shotmaker Elite camera car and crane, an invention used for more efficient shooting of action sequences.

For relaxation, Needham enjoyed race cars. He owned the Budweiser Rocket Car, which Air Force radar clocked at more than 739 mph. Needham claimed it was the first land vehicle to break the sound barrier, although the achievement went unrecognized by any sanctioning body.

Despite a taste for gold chains, medallions and even a pendant made from a gold toothpick given to him by actress Ann-Margret, Needham was known as a modest, plain-spoken man. In interviews, he would ask to be forgiven for a little “braggadocio” when telling some of his larger-than-life Hollywood tales, like the time he taught John Wayne how to throw a punch.

It was on the set of a 1969 western – “The Undefeated” – and, because of the camera’s position just behind the character he was supposed to be decking, Wayne had a hard time delivering a fake punch that looked believable.

“Duke was throwing a straight-on jab by the side of the guy’s face. You could tell he was missing the guy by a mile,” Needham wrote in his 2011 memoir, “Stuntman! My Car-Crashing, Plane-Jumping, Bone-Breaking, Death-Defying Hollywood Life.”

Without being asked, Needham stepped in and demonstrated an ever-so-close roundhouse punch – a lesson for which the Duke did not thank him. Later on, in a bar, Wayne grabbed the stuntman in a headlock and loudly berated him for showing him up in front of the crew. Then he gave his captive “a friendly Dutch rub” and let him go, saying: “Get it done, Needham.”

The two remained friends until Wayne’s death in 1979.

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