Jeff Conaway spent his best years standing next to the lead. His Kenickie and his Bobby Wheeler are cocky young men who know they are not the story, and he played that knowledge with more care than either script asked of him.
Fi1m perspective
Kenickie in Grease (1978) is the friend, the one with the harder face and the shorter temper, and Conaway plays him as though nobody has mentioned that it is not his film. Every entrance is an entrance. He had already played Danny Zuko in the Broadway production, so he arrived on the film set knowing the material and was handed the best friend, and rather than sulk he gave the part a stage actor's full-body swagger. Our review of Grease gives the evening to the songs, John Travolta's dancing and Stockard Channing, which is fair; Conaway's job is to make the boys look dangerous when they are not singing, and he does it.
The better part came the same year. In Taxi (1978–1981) he is Bobby Wheeler, the cab driver who is really an actor, or says he is, and our review credits him and Tony Danza with keeping the garage from settling into a single comic rhythm. Bobby is written as the vain one, and the jokes are mostly at his expense. We felt sorrier for him than the writers seem to have intended, because Conaway plays the vanity as hope: Bobby is not conceited so much as a man who has not yet been told no often enough to believe it. That is a small, precise piece of acting inside a programme that belongs to Judd Hirsch and Marilu Henner.
He left after three seasons. "In 'Taxi,' I kept doing the same scene for three years. I was underused," he said later, and he had a point, even if the programme was very good at that scene. The career before it had been long for a man not yet thirty: a child on Broadway in All the Way Home (1960), a film debut in Jennifer on My Mind (1971), Willie in Pete's Dragon (1977). The career after it was steadier and quieter. He was Prince Erik Greystone in Wizards and Warriors (1983), and then, for several seasons, the security officer Zack Allan in Babylon 5 (1994–1998), first recurring and then a regular. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it at length, but the casting tells its own story: the swagger had become dependability, and dependability is what long-running television wants.
What he could do was timing and presence in a crowded room, learned on stage and spent on ensembles. What he was rarely allowed to do was anything else; the charming, cocky or troubled young man followed him from Kenickie to Bobby and he grew tired of it before the audience did. Start with Taxi, where the part is smallest and he does most with it. Then watch Grease for the songs, and notice who is standing beside Travolta when the singing stops.
Biography
Jeff Conaway was an American actor. He was born Jeffrey Charles William Michael Conaway on 5 October 1950 in New York City and died on 27 May 2011 in Encino, California.
As a child he appeared in the Broadway production of All the Way Home (1960). He later studied at the North Carolina School of the Arts and New York University. Conaway was an understudy and then replacement for Danny Zuko in the original Broadway cast of the musical Grease; he played Kenickie in the 1978 film adaptation.
He is also known for playing Bobby Wheeler in the television series Taxi (1978–1982) and Zack Allan in Babylon 5 (1994–1998). Other film credits include Pete's Dragon (1977), The Eagle Has Landed (1976) and Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988).
