Kitty O’Neil, who has died aged 72, was a trailblazer for women in the Hollywood stunt industry. After becoming the first woman to join the elite team at Stunts Unlimited, in 1976, she was a double for the stars of two hit American TV series.

Standing in for Lynda Carter in Wonder Woman from 1977 until 1979, she memorably leapt head first from a height of 127ft from the roof of the Valley Hilton hotel in Sherman Oaks, California.

As she landed on the pool terrace after performing a flip in mid-air, O’Neil hit a life-saving air bag with precision. The superhero – the first woman to feature prominently in American comic books – was then seen apprehending a villain leaving the hotel.

The fearless stunt artist was confronting the bad guys again (they were invariably male) in The Bionic Woman (1976-78) when she doubled for Lindsay Wagner as Jaime Sommers, who had been rebuilt with bionic legs, right arm and right ear, following a near-fatal skydiving accident. The character used her human-made superpowers while serving as a government intelligence agent – and performing stunts such as flipping a dune buggy that were all in a day’s work for O’Neil.

Women doing stunts in Hollywood could be traced back to “damsel in distress” actors performing their own hair-raising exploits during the silent-film era, although the job of stunt performer was overwhelmingly taken by men – who doubled for both male and female stars (and still do).

The Stuntwomen’s Association of Motion Pictures was formed in 1967 and O’Neil’s brilliance helped to make the Hollywood establishment take women seriously. However, female stunt artists still face discrimination, allied to the challenge of doing the same work as men while often wearing skimpy outfits that allow no room for padding.

Away from television, O’Neil set a string of land, air and water records. In 1976 she became the fastest female driver by hitting 512.71mph in a hydrogen peroxide-fuelled three-wheel machine, the SMI Motivator, in the Alvord desert, Oregon – a record that still stands.

She also set two women’s speed records on water – skiing at 104.85mph in 1970 and piloting the jet-powered boat Captain Crazy at 275mph in 1977. She broke her own 1979 women’s high-fall record – the Wonder Woman stunt – by jumping 180ft from a helicopter on to an air bag that, she said, looked like a postage stamp from that height.

All these daredevil achievements came against a backdrop of O’Neil having lost her hearing when she was four months old after contracting measles and smallpox. “Because I was deaf, I had a very positive mental attitude,” O’Neil explained. “You have to show people you can do anything.”

She was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, to Patsy (nee Compton) and John O’Neil. Her father was an oil prospector turned US army air forces major. After Kitty became deaf, her mother taught her lip-reading and how to speak, and she learned to play the piano and cello by sensing subtle changes in vibrations.

At the age of 12, Kitty took up diving and won local and state competitions. In 1962, on moving to Anaheim, California, she trained with the Olympic gold medal-winning diver and coach Sammy Lee while attending Savanna high school.

She won the 10-metre competition at the 1964 Amateur Athletic Union diving national championships, but her hopes of representing the US in that year’s Olympics were dashed when she broke her wrist and also suffered spinal meningitis.

She subsequently switched to water-skiing, then car racing and cross-country motorcycle racing. When she severed two fingers in a bike accident in 1972, Ronald “Duffy” Hambleton, a fellow racer, took her to hospital and gave the go-ahead for them to be re-attached.

The couple lived together for several years and Hambleton introduced her to the stunt performer and coordinator Hal Needham, who had co-founded Stunts Unlimited. She joined his racing team and he trained her as a stunt performer.

After working on the film Airport 1975 (1974), O’Neil doubled for Lee Grant drowning in a sinking jet plane in its sequel, Airport ’77 (1977), and was set on fire during a graveyard seance for September 30, 1955 (1977), a fictional drama about fans’ reactions to James Dean’s death.

Her other films included Damien: Omen II (1978), The Blues Brothers (1980) and Smokey and the Bandit II (1980), the last of these directed by Needham and starring his friend Burt Reynolds, in which she drove the lead car jumping over trucks.

Her fame was honoured with a Kitty O’Neil action figure made by Mattel and the TV movie Silent Victory: The Kitty O’Neil Story (1979), with Stockard Channing in the lead role and O’Neil performing some of the stunts.

Although she declared herself to be afraid of nothing, O’Neil retired from stunt performing in 1982 after the deaths of several friends, then lived with Ky Michaelson, designer of rocket-powered vehicles, in Minneapolis.

In 1993 she moved to Eureka, South Dakota, with her new partner, Raymond Wald, who died in 2009. Her marriages to John Piazza (1967) and Thomas Justice (1980) both ended in divorce.

• Kitty Linn O’Neil, stunt performer, born 24 March 1946; died 2 November 2018