George Kennedy was born on February 18, 1925, in New York City, into a show business family. His father, George Harris Kennedy, a musician and orchestra leader, died when Kennedy was four years old. He was raised by his mother, Helen A. (née Kieselbach), a ballet dancer. His maternal grandfather was a German immigrant; his ancestry also included Irish and English. Kennedy made his stage debut at age two in a touring company of Bringing Up Father, and by seven was a New York City radio DJ. Joining the U.S. military during World War II, he spent 16 years in that career until the late 1950s, when a back injury prompted him to find other work. He reached a rank of captain. His first notable screen role was a military advisor on the TV sitcom The Phil Silvers Show, where he served as a technical adviser, a role which Kennedy later described as “a great training ground”. His film career began in 1961 in The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come. He appeared in several Hollywood movies, including Charade (1963), Strait-Jacket (1964), ed the character “Blodgett” in a 1966 episode “Return to Lawrence” of the ABC western series The Legend of Jesse James. Then came the role for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in Cool Hand Luke (1967), that of “Dragline”, a chain-gang convict who at first resents the new prisoner in camp played by Paul Newman, then comes to idolize the rebellious Luke.

George Kennedy followed this role with films such as The Dirty Dozen, Bandolero!, and The Boston Strangler. In 1970, he appeared in the Academy Award-winning disaster film Airport, in which he played one of its main characters, airline troubleshooter Joe Patroni. He reprised this role in Airport 1975, Airport ’77, and The Concorde … Airport ’79. The Airport franchise helped inspire the Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker satire Airplane!, in which the filmmakers hoped to cast Kennedy as the bumbling plane dispatcher. The role went to Lloyd Bridges, because Kennedy “couldn’t kill off his Airport cash-cow”, Jerry Zucker said in 2010. Kennedy co-starred with Clint Eastwood in two films, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and The Eiger Sanction, and with ensemble casts in the disaster film Earthquake and the Agatha Christie mystery Death on the Nile. In 1984, George Kennedy starred opposite Bo Derek in the box-office bomb Bolero. He made other minor films including Savage Dawn, The Delta Force, and Creepshow 2, before playing a role in the comedy film The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! in 1988, playing Captain Ed Hocken opposite Leslie Nielsen’s comical cop Frank Drebin. There were two sequels in which Kennedy co-starred. On television, Kennedy starred as Carter McKay in the CBS prime time serial Dallas (1978–1991), appearing from 1988 to 1991. From the mid- to late-1990s, he promoted Breathasure tablets in radio and television commercials. Around this time, he reprised his role as McKay in the television films Dallas: J.R. Returns and Dallas: War of the Ewings. In the late 1970s, Kennedy also appeared as a celebrity guest on the television game show Match Game.

In 1998, he voiced Brick Bazooka for the film Small Soldiers. He then made several independent films, before making a 2003 comeback to television in the soap opera The Young and the Restless, playing the character Albert Miller, the biological father to legendary character Victor Newman. In 2005, he made a cameo appearance in the film Don’t Come Knocking, playing the director of an ill-fated western. George Kennedy made his final film appearance in The Gambler (2014) as Ed, the dying grandfather of Mark Wahlberg’s Jim Bennett. His role lasts for less than two minutes during the film’s opening scene, wherein Ed (moments before his death) bequeaths the responsibilities of patriarch to a heartbroken Jim. George Kennedy resided in Eagle, Idaho, at the time of his death. He died on the morning of Sunday, February 28, 2016, of a heart ailment[1] at an assisted living facility in Middleton, Idaho, at the age of 91. He had a history of heart disease. He had also been much affected by the death of Joan, his third wife, less than six months previously. At the time of his death, Kennedy was the oldest living Oscar winner in the Best Supporting Actor category. Coincidentally, he died the day of the 88th Academy Awards ceremony.