George Kennedy: Versatile character actor who won an Oscar for 'Cool Hand Luke' and was a mainstay of 1970s disaster films

In a career which included more than 175 films and television credits, he was one of the most dependable performers in Hollywood

George Kennedy with his Oscar (AP)

The burly character actor George Kennedy won an Academy Award as a chain-gang leader in Cool Hand Luke, threatened Audrey Hepburn as a hook-armed villain in Charade and was a crusty mainstay of 1970s disaster films before veering into satire as a clueless policeman in the Naked Gun film series.

In a career spanning more than 175 films and television credits, he was among the most dependable and versatile performers in Hollywood. Whether malevolent, earnest or serving as comic relief, he held his corner opposite such charismatic stars as Cary Grant, Paul Newman, John Wayne and James Stewart.

The son of entertainers, Kennedy was a child actor on the radio and then spent around 15 years in the US Army before re-emerging in show business in the late 1950s playing a military police officer on the sitcom The Phil Silvers Show. Kennedy, who stood 6ft 4in and weighed more than 20 stones, made his screen debut as a rebel soldier opposite Kirk Douglas in Spartacus (1960).

His most important early film was Stanley Donen's Charade (1963), which starred Grant and Hepburn in an engaging, Paris-set blend of suspense, romance and sophisticated comedy. Kennedy played one of the war veterans who tries to frighten a recent widow (Hepburn) into revealing where her late husband stashed money stolen during the war.

The film historian Jeanne Basinger said Kennedy “can ride that fine line between very scary menacing villain and fitting in with a lighter-hearted comic mode. He had the ability to give subtle variations on his basic persona – he could shade it toward comedy, shade it away from comedy.”

Kennedy remained a welcome presence even if the films were not of the highest calibre. After Charade, he played heavies in Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte and Straightjacket (both 1964), and over the next few years had supporting parts in dramas including Shenandoah, The Flight of the Phoenix and The Sons of Katie Elder, and was a gruff major in The Dirty Dozen.

His breakthrough performance was in Cool Hand Luke (1967), which starred Newman as a hard case who is sent to a Southern chain gang for cutting the heads off parking meters. Kennedy played the veteran convict Dragline, who at first sees Luke as a threat to his authority and nearly kills him in a boxing ring. “Yeah, I beat up Paul Newman and alienated every woman in America,” he later joked.

The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote that Kennedy was “powerfully obsessive as the top dog who handles things his way as effectively and finally as destructively as does the warden or the guards.”

After Cool Hand Luke, Kennedy's fee shot up from $20,000 to $200,000 per film. He began a run of lawmen characters in films such as Hurry Sundown (1967) and The Boston Strangler (1968). He also appeared in a variety of westerns, including Fools' Parade (1971) with Stewart and Cahill US Marshal (1973) with Wayne, and had supporting parts in two Clint Eastwood dramas, as a foul-tempered crook in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) and as a mountain climber in the spy thriller The Eiger Sanction (1975). He coasted through a series of action and disaster films such as Earthquake (1974) and the four Airport films based on Arthur Hailey's bestselling novel.

Over the course of the Airport films, Kennedy's character, Joe Patroni, goes from salty maintenance chief to cocksure Concorde pilot. The series' earnestness of the bordered on self-parody by the last instalment, in which pilot Patroni opens the window of the supersonic Concorde and shoots a flare to divert an onrushing ballistic missile.

Airport helped inspire the Zucker Brothers' antic Airplane! satire, in which they hoped to cast Kennedy as the bumbling plane dispatcher. The role went to Lloyd Bridges because Kennedy, said Jerry Zucker, “couldn't kill off his Airport cash-cow.” Jerry and his brother David eventually hired Kennedy to play his authoritative presence for laughs in The Naked Gun (1988) as Captain Ed Hocken, the dim-witted boss of Leslie Nielsen's pratfall-prone detective. Kennedy also appeared in two sequels.

He was born in New York in 1925. He was an infant when his father, a bandleader, died. He was raised by his mother, a dancer, and spent much of his childhood acting in children's radio productions. He served in the Army Air Forces in Europe during the Second World War, then was assigned to the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. Because of Army policy against officers going on air, Captain Kennedy used a pseudonym to broadcast from Seoul.

“If your inclinations were far more towards show business and less towards the Army – as mine always were – you found a way to get on the air,” he recalled. “I learned how to use my voice and so many other things there, and I'll forever be grateful for that.”

A back injury led to his discharge, and he became a technical advisor and actor on The Phil Silvers Show, a comedy set on an Army base. He later starred in two short-lived series, Sarge (1971-72) as a policeman-turned-priest, and The Blue Knight (1975-76), based on Joseph Wambaugh's novel about a policeman on the beat. From 1988-91, he was in Dallas“ as a rival to Larry Hagman's JR Ewing.

His other films included Death on the Nile (1978) as a lawyer and The Delta Force (1986) as a priest. He played a version of himself, the star of a ludicrous science-fiction film, in Albert Brooks' 1981 comedy Modern Romance.

In addition to his own children, he helped raise a granddaughter whose mother had drug problems. His memoir, Trust Me, was published in 2011. That year, he told an interviewer that a lonely childhood had led him to a career in entertainment. “Acting is beautiful,” he said. “If I'm prejudiced toward doing it, it is because of the joy that I derive from it. Add that to the fact that I didn't have any other choices. I either talked to myself, or I didn't talk to anybody.”

George Harris Kennedy, actor: born New York 18 February 1925; twice married (two children); died Middleton, Idaho 28 February 2016.

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