Curious About George

George Kennedy and Clint Eastwood relax on the set of "The Eiger Sanction."

He roughed up Kirk Douglas, terrorized Cary Grant, was hired to murder Gregory Peck, beat the stuffing out of Paul Newman, tried to kill John Wayne – twice – and got his head lopped off by an axe-murderer.

When George Kennedy died of a heart ailment at the age of 91 on February 28, 2016, his grandson, Corey Schenkel, described him as “just a quiet family man” who “always put his family first and was always happy to take time out to talk to fans. He never turned a fan away, just enjoyed making movies and bringing joy to other people.”

George Kennedy’s father, an orchestra leader, died when he was four. In poverty, George and his mother, a ballet dancer, lived for a time in a brothel.

After enlisting at the age of 17, George Kennedy served in the U.S. Army infantry in Europe during World War II and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war ended, he was commissioned as an officer and joined the Armed Forces Radio Network in Frankfurt and Berlin, followed by Tokyo and Korea. During his 16 years in the service, he opened the Army’s first office of technical assistance for motion pictures and television.

A back injury prompted his retirement from the Army, and he became an adviser on the service sitcom “The Phil Silvers Show” (pictured above) which led to bit parts on the series. Kennedy would remember, “I was praying one of the guys wouldn’t show up so I could stand in for him.” In fact, he ended up playing an MP on the show, which he described as “a great training ground,” leading to roles in other shows.

George Kennedy plays Lt. John Bryson in a 1960 episode of "Have Gun Will Travel."

From 1959 into the 1960s, George Kennedy appeared in numerous series, the majority of them, in the words of The New York Times’ Robert D. McFadden, “a bonanza of westerns,” and, more often than not, as the bad guy, which seemed fitting for the sturdily built, 6’ 4” actor. In a 1969 interview, Kennedy said, “If it had been the time of shorter heroes – (Edward G.) Robinson, Alan Ladd, Bogart – I couldn’t have gotten arrested. But it was the era of the big guys. Men like Jim Arness and Clint Walker needed someone big to beat up in their television series.”

George Kennedy assaults Cary Grant in "Charade."

A number of his early movie roles cast him as a sadistic thug or just plain creepy lurker. In the modern western “Lonely Are the Brave” (1962), he portrayed a brutal deputy who gives Kirk Douglas a jailhouse workover; in "Charade" (1963), he tried to use his prosthetic hand as a human can opener on Cary Grant's face; in “Strait-Jacket” (1964), he was a shady handyman who loses his head to an axe-murderer; in the Hitchcockian thriller “Mirage” (1965), he played a goon named Willard tasked with getting rid of Gregory Peck; in “The Sons of Katie Elder” (1965), he was the gunslinger Curley, hired to kill John Wayne. Such thuggish portrayals culminated in his breakout role as Dragline, the strutting cock-of-the-walk in a chain gang in “Cool Hand Luke” (1967), starring Paul Newman as an incorrigible nonconformist who shakes up the pecking order in the rural prison,

The loudmouthed Dragline’s resentment of the cocksure Luke turns to reverence after the two have a prison yard boxing match during which the battered and bruised Luke refuses to admit defeat. Critic Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote, “George Kennedy is powerfully obsessive as the top dog who handles things his way as effectively and finally as destructively as does the warden or guards.”

George Kennedy’s performance in “Cool Hand Luke” earned him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. His acceptance speech was short and sweet. Calling it “the greatest moment in my life,” he gushed, “Oh, I could bust!” Years later, he remembered saying to his agent, “They’re not going to give me this role. I’m one of those third-guy-through-the-door guys.” Critic Charles Champlin noted that the role of Dragline “will almost certainly do for George Kennedy what ‘Cat Ballou’ did for Lee Marvin – pay off with stardom in a long honorable hitch at lesser servitude.”

Dragline (George Kennedy) ogles "my Lucille" (Joy Harmon) in "Cool Hand Luke."

In The New York Times obituary for George Kennedy, Robert D. McFadden commented, “His rugged but bland looks were right for almost any part. He was tall and burly, with a bull neck, eyes that widened with shock or narrowed to menacing slits, a disingenuous smile and big ham hands to grip the gun or slap the girl. In the mold of Lee Marvin or Lee Van Cleef, he was a first-rate thug, and his deadpan look was perfect for disaster pictures or comedies.”

...Speaking of comedies, George Kennedy showed what a good sport he was when
he played himself - as a bland actor starring in a cheesy science-fiction picture -
in Albert Brooks' quirky comedy "Modern Romance" (1981).

Throughout his career, Kennedy frequently worked with the same directors. He was a favorite of Andrew V. McLaglen, who had directed the actor in a number of episodes of “Gunsmoke” and “Have Gun Will Travel.” On the big screen, McLaglen directed Kennedy in “The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come” (1961), “Shenandoah” (1965), “The Ballad of Josie” (1967), “Bandolero!” (1968), “Fools’ Parade” (1971), and “Cahill U.S. Marshal” (1973).

George Kennedy portrays a Union colonel in "Shenandoah," starring James Stewart.

For director Robert Aldrich, George Kennedy acted in “Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte” (1964), “The Flight of the Phoenix” (1965), “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), and “The Legend of Lylah Clare” (1968).

George Kennedy plays Major Armbruster in "The Dirty Dozen." In the 1998
action fantasy "Small Soldiers," directed by Joe Dante ("Gremlins"), for the
voices of the Commando Elite action figures, George Kennedy was reunited
with "The Dirty Dozen" costars Ernest Borgnine, Jim Brown, and Clint Walker.

In 1970, George Kennedy played Joe Patroni, an airline mechanic and troubleshooter, in “Airport,” the seminal all-star disaster movie of the 1970s. The cigar-chomping Patroni returned in “Airport 1975,” “Airport ’77,” and “The Concorde…Airport ’79,” making Kennedy the only actor to appear in all four “Airport” films.

(Top) Burt Lancaster and George Kennedy strategize in the original "Airport";
(bottom) George, David Warner, Eddie Albert, and Alain Delon fly the
unfriendly skies of "The Concorde...Airport '79."

The “Airport” franchise partly inspired the 1980 comedy “Airplane!” Filmmakers Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker had hoped to cast George Kennedy as the inept, glue-sniffing flight control supervisor, a role that eventually went to Lloyd Bridges. Abrahams and the Zuckers finally got to work with Kennedy when he was cast as Captain Ed Hocken in the “Naked Gun” films – “The Naked Gun” (1988), “The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear” (1991), and “Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult” – starring Leslie Nielsen as the bumbling detective, Lieutenant Frank Drebin.

On the short-lived 1982 series “Police Squad!” Captain Hocken had been portrayed deadpan by Alan North, an austere stage actor whose movie roles included Massachusetts Governor John Andrew in “Glory” (1989). When “Police Squad!” was being readied for the big screen’s “Naked Gun” franchise, the studio insisted on an actor with a higher marquee value for the role of Hocken..

Alan North and Leslie Nielsen share a laugh in "Police Squad!"

After the first “Naked Gun” picture, George Kennedy told New York’s Newsday, “I had the time of my life doing it. It’s so funny, it was hard to shoot the movie.”

George Kennedy gets mad...and even...in "The Human Factor."

In 1975, Kennedy was afforded the rare opportunity to star as the leading man, playing a NATO computer expert working in Naples whose family is killed by terrorists, in “The Human Factor.” The tragedy turns George into an unlikely action hero, wreaking bloody vengeance, like Charles Bronson in "Death Wish" but with the aid of a computer. Costarring John Mills, “The Human Factor” was the last film directed by Edward Dmytryk, a onetime Hollywood blacklisted director who directed George Kennedy in the aforementioned “Mirage.”

(Left) George Kennedy, starring in "Brass Target," joined the ranks of actors who
have portrayed General George S. Patton (the real deal, second from left), including
George C. Scott in "Patton" and Kirk Douglas in "Is Paris Burning?"

Another rare casting decision found Kennedy portraying General George S. Patton in “Brass Target” (1978), a political thriller about a conspiracy to assassinate “Old Blood and Guts” shortly after the end of World War II. Directed by John Hough (“The Legend of Hell House”), the film featured Sophia Loren, John Cassavetes, Robert Vaughn, Patrick McGoohan, and Max von Sydow. (Interestingly, Kennedy played another historical figure, President Warren G. Harding, in the 1979 miniseries “Backstairs at the White House.”)

He starred in two TV series in the early 1970s. “Sarge,” which aired for a single season, cast him as a cop-turned-priest. He had better luck – two seasons – as the star of “The Blue Knight” (pictured above). Based on the novel by cop-turned-bestselling author Joseph Wambaugh, the show centered on aging, streetwise beat cop Bumper Morgan, a character earlier portrayed by William Holden in a 1973 TV movie. In the later seasons of "Dallas" and in TV reunion movies, Kennedy had a recurring role as Carter McKay, a ranching foe of the Ewing family.

In the early 1980s, George Kennedy wrote two mystery novels, Murder on Location and Murder on High, casting himself as the sleuth.

During the span of his 55-year career in front of cameras, George Kennedy had the pleasure of working with a galaxy of stars, among them Kirk Douglas, Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Gregory Peck, John Wayne, James Stewart, Lee Marvin, Michael Caine, Jane Fonda, Paul Newman, Doris Day, Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, Clint Eastwood, Charlton Heston, Jack Lemmon, Peter Ustinov, Sonny Chiba, and Bo Derek.

When George Kennedy was awarded a long overdue star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1991, he said, “Ever since I was a little boy, my heroes were movie stars." Welcome to the galaxy, George…

George Kennedy's final film role was playing Mark Wahlberg's grandfather in
"The Gambler" (2014). George poses with actors Richard Schiff, Mark Wahlberg,
and Rasta Phil.