George Kennedy

Cigar in his teeth, voice up, George Kennedy is standing on a runway in Airport (1970) trying to shift a jet that does not want to be shifted. Everyone else in the film is having an affair or a breakdown. Joe Patroni is having a shift. Our review called him the only person on screen who appears to enjoy his job, and that is Kennedy in one line: a large man who would rather fix the thing than talk about it.

He came to films late, after sixteen years in the US Army, and by way of television westerns and small parts from the mid-1950s. The size got him cast as heavies first, Herman Scobie in Charade (1963) among them. Then came the late 1960s, The Dirty Dozen (1967) and, the same year, Dragline in Cool Hand Luke, the chain-gang heavy whose contempt for a new prisoner does not last. That is the performance people mean when they say he could act rather than merely stand there, and it is the one we would send a newcomer to first.

The 1970s made him the disaster film's handyman. He played Patroni in all four Airport films, from 1970 to 1979, the only actor to last the whole series, and by the end the part had stopped asking anything of him. Critics have called him a lug, and the later sequels give them their evidence. The bulk that made Dragline frightening became a costume, and the studios were happy to hire the costume.

Then, at sixty-three, he found the best use for it. As Ed Hocken in The Naked Gun (1988), and in its two sequels, Kennedy plays Frank Drebin's captain exactly as he would have played a captain in a film with no jokes in it. Our review noted that he fitted comfortably alongside Priscilla Presley and Ricardo Montalban as ordinary acting that had wandered into the wrong film, and that is the whole trick. Nielsen is the star, but Nielsen needs somebody to nod. We laughed hardest at Hocken not when he did anything but when he simply listened to Drebin, brow furrowed, taking nonsense down as if it were evidence, because thirty years of playing men who mean it had taught him never to blink.

He went on working in supporting parts until The Gambler (2014), much of it in films nobody will ask you about. Asked once where he trained, he said "In life", and you can see what he meant and also what it cost him: a man who looked that much like the real thing was offered little else. If you want him, take the two ends. Dragline in 1967 and Hocken in 1988 are the same man, once in earnest and once in on the joke, and the joke is funnier for knowing how earnest he had been.