George Kennedy’s pummelling of a punch-drunk Paul Newman in the prison drama Cool Hand Luke and his ecstatic cheerleading as Newman later tries to eat 50 hardboiled eggs were among the most memorable film sequences of the 1960s.
As the character Dragline, an illiterate and thuggish inmate who bullies Luke, but is impressed by the fact that he refuses to go down, and is then humanised by the freewheeling hero, Kennedy won an Oscar for best supporting actor in 1968. He would forever be associated with the cult movie that chimed with the rebellious mood of the times.
A bear-like man with a deep, booming voice, Kennedy had till then mainly paid his rent in Hollywood by playing “third-through-the-door bad guys” in TV westerns. His salary went up ten times after Cool Hand Luke. So did the quality of the roles he was offered as directors began to see craft in his watchable but uncomplicated acting technique, at odds with the still fashionable Method school. He was a doer rather than a theoretician. “The marvellous thing about that movie was that as my part progresses, I changed from a bad guy to a good guy,” he recalled. “The moguls in Hollywood must have said, ‘Hey, this fellow can do something besides be a bad guy’.”
Kennedy never looked back. He had been born with showbiz in his veins as the son of a bandleader and a ballet dancer. His childhood descended into poverty after the early death of his father during the Depression; he joined the US Army at the earliest opportunity, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944-45. He served as a regular soldier after the war, but was later invalided out because of a curved spine that had afflicted him since birth. A role as a military adviser on The Phil Silvers Show in the late Fifties was as close as he could get to his dream of acting. “I was praying one of the (regular) guys wouldn’t show up, so I could stand in for him,” he recalled. One day, a producer noticed his hulking form and said: “Hey, looks like you could play a bad guy.”
For several years, he appeared in TV westerns such as Rawhide, Bonanza and Maverick. “All I had to do was show up on the set, and I got beaten up.” He got his first break by pretending that he could ride a horse and did not let on that being in the saddle was agony because of his spinal problem.
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Kennedy went on to play more sophisticated parts such as the villain with a prosthetic arm who attacks Audrey Hepburn and is later drowned in a bath in the 1963 whodunnit, Charade. He assaults Joan Crawford with an axe in the 1964 thriller Strait-Jacket and appeared with both Crawford and her real-life arch enemy, Bette Davis, in Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte in the same year.
Off camera, Kennedy was a kindly and easy-going man who found himself caught in the crossfire of the simmering feud between two of Hollywood’s grand dames. “When I first met Bette Davis she hated me because she had heard that I was in Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte only because Joan Crawford was meant to be in it,” he recalled. “So she never missed an opportunity to slip me a zinger — push a flowerpot off a ledge just to miss me.” They later became friends.
He outlasted his “baddie” typecasting in westerns on the big screen, appearing with James Stewart in Shenandoah, in which he played a sympathetic Union officer. He was cast in several other westerns by the director Andrew McLaglen; the last teamed him up with John Wayne in Cahill US Marshal (1973).
Cool Hand Luke persuaded Hollywood producers that his tough features could just as effectively be moulded into the hangdog expression of a beleaguered good guy. Over the next decade, Kennedy was a stalwart of Tinseltown, often playing world-weary cops. In Airport, he appeared as Joe Patroni, a cigar-toting troubleshooter charged with averting disaster; he appeared in the sequels too. Its success led to him being cast in many of the other big-budget, all-star movies that Airport helped to usher in, such as Earthquake.
He was offered a part in the spoof Airplane! but turned it down, fearing that it would antagonise the makers of Airport, his “cash cow”. By the Eighties, the all-star juggernauts had had their day. His career reached its nadir when he co-starred with Bo Derek in the 1984 erotic drama Bolero, widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. Spoof comedies that he had earlier spurned gave him another chance; he played the dim-witted crime boss alongside Leslie Nielsen in the Naked Gun franchise.
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Reflecting on the highlights of a career in which he appeared in more than 175 films, Kennedy recalled filming The Eiger Sanction, a mountaineering drama that was one of Clint Eastwood’s early outings as actor-director. Kennedy was, with Eastwood, lowered by helicopter on to the summit of a tiny needle of rock in Arizona. Eastwood insisted there would be no stunt doubles or polystyrene rocks because audiences “could not be fooled” any more. “I must have been insane to listen to that,” said Kennedy. “We were up there for five hours. When the helicopter returned to lift us off, the down draught from the blades kept trying to push us over the edge. I’ve never been so scared. Then Clint said we need to go back up tomorrow. Men have been certified for less.”
George Harris Kennedy was born in New York City in 1925 into a family with English, Irish and German ancestry. He made his stage debut at the age of two as a ventriloquist’s dummy and appeared on radio shows. His father died when he was four and he moved around with his mother, sleeping in doorways and cars and living in a brothel for a time. The loneliness of his childhood inspired him to create characters. “I either talked to myself or I didn’t talk to anybody,” he said.
War brought escape. At 17, he enlisted and served in Europe. Two years later, he married Dorothy Gillooly, but the marriage eventually failed because of the insecurity that came with his pursuit of acting. He then married Revel Wurman, a struggling New York cabaret singer, and they moved to Hollywood. They had two children, Chris, a chiropractor, and Karianne. They both survive him. He and Wurman divorced in 1977. His third wife was Joan McCarthy, a former actress who was “discovered” by Howard Hughes. They tied the knot on a beach in California in 1978. McCarthy slipped a white shift over her swimming costume and Kennedy said “I do” in his trunks. They already had three adopted children when one of them, McCarthy’s daughter Shauna, sank into drug addiction; the couple adopted her two-year-old daughter, Taylor, and he spoke publicly about the need for people to embrace adoption. “That kid, some place right now, cold and wet, needs somebody to say, ‘I love you kid, good night’.” McCarthy died in 2015.
Kennedy, who suffered from heart problems in later years, wound down his acting career after undergoing a triple heart bypass operation in 2002. Advertisers used his image as the dependable tough guy and he wrote a memoir, Trust Me. He corresponded graciously with fans and never tired of answering the question that he was asked more than any other: “Did Paul Newman really eat 50 hardboiled eggs?”
George Kennedy, actor, was born on February 18, 1925. He died on February 28, 2016, aged 91