By Erin Free
“I have been so fortunate, and I really am appreciative of the success that I’ve had,” the towering George Kennedy once said. “I had the good fortune of speaking with Orson Welles many decades ago, and he said, ‘Success is primarily luck anyway.’ And I have been very lucky. Of course, Orson Welles was enormously talented and brilliant – so who am I to argue with him!” Big, bullish, strong, and imposing, it’s wholly appropriate that the under celebrated character actor, George Kennedy, lived until the age of 91, passing away earlier today of natural causes. The actor had been in hospice care for a month after his health began deteriorating upon his wife’s death a year ago, his grandson, Cory Schenkel, told TMZ.
Kennedy will unquestionably be best remembered for his wry, full-bodied, Oscar winning performance as the brutishly hilarious Dragline in the 1968 Paul Newman-starring masterpiece, Cool Hand Luke. “The marvelous thing about that movie was that as my part progresses, I changed from a bad guy to a good guy,” the actor once observed. “The moguls in Hollywood must have said, ‘Hey, this fellow can do something besides be a bad guy.’”
Hailing from an era when many actors had actually experienced military combat firsthand, Kennedy had served in WW2, which caused permanent damage to his hearing, but gifted him with the kind of on-screen authenticity and gravitas that you can only get from having ascended life’s peaks, and dipping into its troughs. A veteran of nearly every serialised drama to run on US TV (from Peter Gunn and Maverick to The Untouchables and Rawhide), Kennedy had indeed kicked off his career as a small screen villain. “The big guys were on TV, and they needed big lumps to beat up,” he said. “All I had to do was show up on the set, and I got beaten up.” Kennedy would later show much greater range. He was one of the multitude to cry, “I am Spartacus” in Stanley Kubrick’s titular 1960 classic, and he continued on as a team player for the rest of his career, rarely appearing in lead roles, but regularly making his leading men and women look even better through his sturdy, rock-solid brand of support playing.
Noted for playing mechanic (and later Captain), Joe Patroni, in the hugely successful Airport disaster flicks of the seventies, FilmInk’s greatest fondness for this actor, however, comes via his hilariously self-deprecating work as Captain Ed Hocken in the gut-busting Naked Gun movies opposite the late and equally lamented Leslie Nielsen, and courtesy of two disparate mid-seventies turns with the equally towering Clint Eastwood. In the great 1974 caper flick, Thunderbolt And Lightfoot, Kennedy is pure piss-and-vinegar, serving up a horribly cold dish of unrelenting meanness as the brutal bully, Red Leary, who double crosses everybody in sight and unforgettably stomps the life out of Jeff Bridges’ loveable young bank robber, leading to an unforgettable death at the gnashing jaws of a horde of department store watch-dogs.
In Eastwood’s little known 1975 mountain-climbing thriller, The Eiger Sanction, Kennedy is again the bad guy, but this time one born out of a set of sad and sorry circumstances beyond his control. As always with George Kennedy, this nuanced, richly affecting performance sees the actor belying his intimidating physicality with a striking sense of vulnerability. It’s what made him great. You will be missed, Mr. Kennedy.
