GEORGE PEPPARDGeorge Peppard, who died on 8 May, 1994, played a wide range of roles - from Audrey Hepburn's love interest in the film classic Breakfast at Tiffany’s to the cigar-chewing Hannibal Smith in TV’s The A-Team.
In the early years, Mr Peppard, good-looking and tough, seemed to be following the same career path as Steve McQueen and Paul Newman.
George Peppard was born on 1 October, 1928, in Michigan, son of a building contractor also called George and opera singer Vernelle Rohrer.
He graduated from Dearborn High School, Michigan, and enlisted in the Marine Corps where he rose to Sergeant in the artillery. After 18 months, he left to study civil engineering at Purdue University, Indiana, and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh.
It was there, in 1949, that Mr Peppard made his stage debut at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. He then enrolled in The Actors’ Studio, New York, and his first work on Broadway led to his first television appearance, with Paul Newman, in The United States Steel Hour.
Through the Actors’ Studio he met Jack Garfein, who was embarking on his first film, The Strange One, and lined up Peppard for a part. Next came Pork Chop Hill (1959), a Korean war drama, with Gregory Peck, soon followed by his first starring role, with Robert Mitchum, in the family melodrama Home from the Hill.
His career as a leading man seemed certain when he landed the part of Paul Varjak, the sympathetic young writer who befriends Holly Golightly (played by Audrey Hepburn) in 1961’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Tough guys, however, were more his line, such as the German pilot Bruno Stachel, who challenges the First World War Prussian aristocracy in The Blue Max (1966).
By then, his best days were behind him. His cinema audience was ebbing but a new television career beckoned.
He confirmed his tough-guy role in a long-running series as the Polish detective Banacek in 1972 and followed this as a neurosurgeon in Doctors’ Hospital.
But Mr Peppard wanted to branch out and in 1978 he produced and directed Five Days from Home, which he starred in too. It was well received but a commercial failure and left him heavily in debt.
More disappointment followed when he was cast as Blake Carrington for the pilot of the television series Dynasty, but was replaced by John Forsythe.
In 1983, however, he won probably his best-remembered television role, as the soldier of fortune Hannibal Smith, leader of The A-Team. Smith was a former army colonel leading a madcap band of army veterans who went about righting various wrongs; the series ran for four years and gained a huge following.
Mr Peppard was a heavy smoker most of his life and in 1992 a cancerous tumour was removed from his right lung. He died of pneumonia in Los Angeles.
The tragedy of George Peppard is that he never made the most of his talents. He knew that. He once said: “I was my own worst enemy and that mine isn’t a string of victories. It’s no golden past. I am no George Peppard fan.”
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