HOLLYWOOD — By his own accounting, kept in a spiral notebook he updated for fifty years, Chick Bellamy rolled ninety-one cars on purpose and walked away from all but two.

Charles Bellamy, a stunt driver whose crashes, skids and precision reverses filled action pictures and television for five decades, died July 15 at his home in Sun Valley. He was 88. His daughter said his heart gave out after a long decline.

Known on set as Chick, a name from a boyhood no one could still explain, Bellamy belonged to the trade of people paid to do the dangerous thing once so a star could be shown doing it. He specialized in cars. He could put a sedan into a bootlegger’s turn and stop it on a chalk mark, take a pipe ramp at speed and land the vehicle where the camera wanted it, or roll a car end over end on a buried charge and climb out to the applause of the crew.

The work looked reckless and was, he insisted, the opposite. “People think a stunt is bravery. It’s arithmetic,” he told a film-school audience a few years ago. “Speed, weight, angle, the give in the ramp. You do the math and then you commit to it completely, because the half-hearted version is the version that gets you hurt.”

Bellamy was born in Bakersfield in 1936 and came up racing on dirt tracks in the San Joaquin Valley before a stunt coordinator, short a driver, put him in a picture in 1961. He kept a mechanic’s respect for the machines and a gambler’s memory for the two that went wrong — a barrel roll in 1974 that broke his pelvis, and a canyon-road gag in 1988 that he would describe only as “avoidable, and my fault.”

He trained a generation of younger drivers and pushed, late in his career, for the safety rigs that made the job survivable more often than it had been: the roll cages, the fireproofing, the air rams. Colleagues credited him with quietly refusing gags he judged unsurvivable, and with talking coordinators out of them.

“Chick would look at the setup and just say, ‘Not like that,’ and everybody listened, because he’d forgotten more about wrecking a car than the rest of us knew,” said Dovey Marsh, a stunt coordinator who worked with him for years.

He is survived by his daughter, Ramona Bellamy, of Burbank; a son, Curtis, of Reno; four grandchildren; and a 1969 Mustang he rebuilt three times and never once jumped.

The notebook stayed on the workbench in his garage. The final entries, his daughter said, were not crashes but small maintenance notes in a shaky hand — tire pressures, a carburetor adjustment — the housekeeping of a man who had spent his life making violence come out to the inch, and who kept his own accounts to the end.