George Harris Kennedy, Jr. (born February 18, 1925) is an Academy-Award winning American actor who has appeared in over 200 film and television productions. He is perhaps most familiar as Dragline in Cool Hand Luke and Joe Patroni in the Airport series of disaster movies from the 1970s.
George Washington Kendall (aka George Kennedy) (December 29, 1881 - October 19, 1921) was a Canadian sports promoter best known as the owner of the Montreal Canadiens ice hockey team from 1910 to 1921.
An Anglo-Quebecer, George W. Kendall was born in Montreal, the son of Jane McClosky, an Irish Roman Catholic and George Hiram Kendall, a Scots-Quebecer and a prominent Baptist who owned a successful manufacturing business. At the time of his parent's marriage, the Catholic Church would only recognize it if her non-Catholic spouse agreed to raise the children in the Catholic faith. As such, George W. Kendall was educated at the High School of Montreal and then attended the Saint-Laurent College.
While still in his teens, George W. Kendall embarked on a career as a wrestler and by age twenty was the top wrestler in his weight class in Canada. Because such activities were something his family frowned upon, he wrestled using the name George Kennedy. An entrepreneur at heart, in 1908 the fluently bilingual, "George Kennedy" and friend Joseph-Pierre Gadbois founded the Club Athletique Canadien to promote sporting events in the city of Montreal. On November 12, 1910 he paid J. Ambrose O'Brien $7,500 for the Haileybury Hockey Club, which was moved to Montreal and renamed the Montreal Canadiens.
In 1916, Kendall's hockey team won its first Stanley Cup, but a hockey franchise was only part of his operations. He had already opened a first-class gymnasium and sports club in the east end of Montreal and had set about promoting wrestling and boxing matches that culminated with the staging of the world wrestling heavyweight championship. In 1915, Kendall purchased the rights to distribute the film of the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship in which Jess Willard dethroned champion, Jack Johnson. blank">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159130/ Now, the city's major promoter, Kendall scored another coup for Montreal boxing fans when he arranged a promotional visit to the city by France's wildly popular champion _Georges Carpentier who, a few months after his visit, won the World Light Heavyweight Championship.
During the 1918 pandemic, George Kendall contracted the Spanish flu from which he never fully recovered and died at age thirty-nine on October 19, 1921. On November 3, 1921, his widow, Myrtle Kendall, sold the Canadiens hockey team for $11,000 to businessmen Joseph Cattarinich, Leo Dandurand and Louis A. Letourneau.
George Kennedy (1799-1870) was a Canadian businessman. Georgetown, Ontario is named in his honour.
George Kennedy (born May 5, 1919) was an Australian rules footballer who played with North Melbourne in the VFL.
Kennedy had his best season in 1941, kicking 37 goals, finishing equal 6th in the Brownlow Medal count and winning North Melbourne's best and fairest.
A World War II veteran, sandy-haired, tall and burly George Kennedy at one stage in his career cornered the market at playing tough, no-nonsense characters who were either quite crooked or possessed hearts of gold. Kennedy has notched up an impressive 200+ appearances in both TV and film, and is well respected within the Hollywood community. He started out in TV westerns in the late 1950s and early 1960s ("Have Gun - Will Travel" (1957), "Rawhide" (1959), "Maverick" (1957), "Colt .45" (1957), among others) before scoring minor roles in films including Lonely Are the Brave (1962), Sons of Katie Elder, The (1965) and Flight of the Phoenix, The (1965). The late 1960s was a very busy period for Kennedy, and he was strongly in favor with casting agents, appearing in Hurry Sundown (1967), Dirty Dozen, The (1967) and scoring an Oscar win as Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Cool Hand Luke (1967). The disaster film boom of the 1970s was kind to Kennedy, too, and his talents were in demand for Airport (1970) and the three subsequent sequels, as a grizzled cop in Earthquake (1974), plus the buddy/road film Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) as vicious bank robber Red Leary. The 1980s saw Kennedy appear in a mishmash of roles, playing various characters; however, Kennedy and Leslie Nielsen surprised everyone with their comedic talents in the hugely successful Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, The (1988), and the two screen veterans hammed it up again in, Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear, The (1991), plus Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994). Kennedy has remained busy in Hollywood and has lent his distinctive voice to the animated Cats Don't Dance (1997) and the children's action film Small Soldiers (1998). A Hollywod stalwart for nearly 50 years, he is one of the most enjoyable actors to watch on screen.
