George Roy Hill was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to George Roy and Helen Frances (Owens) Hill, part of a well-to-do Roman Catholic family with interests in the newspaper business; the family owned the Minneapolis Tribune. Hill was no relation to George W. Hill, director and cinematographer of numerous silent movies and early sound films in the 1920s and early 1930s. He was educated at The Blake School, one of Minnesota’s most prestigious private schools, and at Yale University, class of 1943. He had a love of flying. After school, he liked to visit the airport and his hobby was to memorize the records of World War I flying aces. He idolized U.S. pilot Speed Holman who, Hill once explained, “used to make his approach to the spectators at state fairs flying past the grandstand upside down.” Hill obtained his pilot’s licence at the age of 16. Airplanes featured prominently in his later films and are frequently crashed as well — in Slaughterhouse-Five, The World According to Garp and especially The Great Waldo Pepper which showed the influence on Hill of pilots like Speed Holman. George Roy Hill also loved classical music, especially Bach and as an undergraduate at Yale University studied music under notable composer Paul Hindemith, graduating in 1943. His film The World of Henry Orient contains a humorous spoof-like tease of Hindemith during the piano concerto scene of Henry Orient (Peter Sellers) in performance. While at Yale, Hill was a member of the Scroll & Key Society and of the The Spizzwinks(?) and The Whiffenpoofs, America’s oldest collegiate a cappella singing group. During World War II, Hill served in the United States Marine Corps as a cargo pilot in the South Pacific. The outbreak of the Korean War resulted in his recall to active duty service for 18 months as a night fighter pilot, emerging with the rank of major. He was stationed at the Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point jet flight-training center in North Carolina.

After the war, George Roy Hill worked as a newspaper reporter in Texas, then took advantage of the GI Bill to do graduate work at Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland on James Joyce’s use of music in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Some sources say he graduated in 1949 with a Bachelor’s degree in literature. Other sources say his thesis was never completed because he became sidetracked by the Irish theatre, making his stage debut as a walk-on part in 1947 as an actor at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin with Cyril Cusack’s company in a production of George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple. He also had a leading role in “Raven of Wicklow” by Bridget G MacCarthy in the same theater in February 1948. Hill used his Korean War experience as the basis for a TV drama, “My Brother’s Keeper,” which appeared on Kraft Television Theater, with Hill himself in the cast. During his military service at Cherry Point, he had had to be ‘talked down’ by a ground controller at Atlanta airport, an incident that led to his writing the screenplay. The episode was performed and transmitted live in 1953. After his demobilisation, he joined the company as a writer, later becoming a director of various Kraft episodes. He won an Emmy for writing and directing a TV version of A Night to Remember, the story of the sinking of the Titanic. George Roy Hill filmed the Williams play as a Hollywood movie in 1962, then Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic in 1963. The 1964 Peter Sellers movie The World of Henry Orient raised Hill’s profile in Hollywood, but his 1966 blockbuster Hawaii was a setback. Reportedly, when budget estimates reached $14 million, the producers attempted to replace Hill with Arthur Hiller; but abandoned the idea after hundreds of native Polynesians in the cast went on strike, declaring: “We can and will perform only for our friend, Monsieur Hill.”

George Roy Hill rebuilt his Hollywood reputation with the Julie Andrews movie Thoroughly Modern Millie, then Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and, after Slaughterhouse-Five, The Sting. Both Butch Cassidy and The Sting starred Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Butch Cassidy won four Academy Awards; The Sting won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. The success of those two films meant that, for a time, Hill was the sole director in history to have made two of the top 10 moneymaking films. Hill disliked tardiness on set. Paul Newman said of his time (as Cassidy) on Butch Cassidy: “If you weren’t on time, he’d take you up in his airplane. Scare the bejesus out of us.” Hill’s later films included The World According to Garp, The Great Waldo Pepper, Slap Shot, A Little Romance, Funny Farm and The Little Drummer Girl. Deaths in his films usually occur offscreen (The Sting, The Great Waldo Pepper) or else a character is shot in freeze frame the second before dying, while the soundtrack carries on (Butch Cassidy, Garp).