Feb. 29--My first, indelible movie image of a terrible midwestern blizzard has George Kennedy's face on it, which made it seem like nothing, really.
On Sunday the Oscar winning Kennedy died, according to his grandson's Facebook post. There should be a special place in the afterlife for character actors like Kennedy, a celestial dressing room where there are no "No Smoking" signs, and all the reliable, familiar utility men and women who've passed on can enjoy each other's stories about everybody they worked with in the industry.
Kennedy won his supporting actor Oscar for "Cool Hand Luke" (1967). I didn't come to that Paul Newman vehicle until much later. My first encounter with Kennedy, at age 9, was the G-rated but Very Grown Up disaster movie/soap opera "Airport" (1970), set in Chicago, at fictional Lincoln International Airport. The movie was a huge hit (10 Oscar nominations, which seems a mite excessive today), and the airborne bomb explosion scared the hell out of me. For a repeat "Love Bug" customer, "Airport" meant something new, a diversion not really aimed at kids -- a stone-faced but eventful pile-up of unexpected pregnancies and pathetic homegrown terrorists and mugging stowaways.
Kennedy played TWA mechanic Joe Patroni, wielding his cigar like...well, like a really big cigar. In Kennedy's big moment, he pushes a snowbound 707 out of a snowdrift, single-handedly. I remember thinking: Handy guy in bad weather! And he used the word "mother" in a way I hadn't heard in a movie before!
As an actor, whether in one of the "Airport" semi-sequels (his character stayed the same; everyone else changed) or in the "Naked Gun" comedies, Kennedy brought heaps of zest to every assignment. His was a face you liked seeing again. Often it had been a while, if you missed his last couple of pictures. There were always a couple more. Kennedy was 91, and next time it snows and I'm rocking my Honda Fit back and forth, trying to nose out of the drift, I'll think of George Kennedy.
