George Peppard

George Peppard Jr. was an American actor born on October 1, 1928, in Detroit, Michigan, to building contractor George Peppard Sr. and music voice teacher Vernelle Rohrer Peppard. The family later settled in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, where Peppard graduated from Dearborn High School in 1946. Shortly after graduation, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps on July 8, 1946, attaining the rank of corporal before leaving the service in January 1948.

Peppard initially pursued civil engineering at Purdue University during 1948 and 1949, where he joined the Purdue Playmakers theatre troupe and Beta Theta Pi fraternity. His admiration for actor Walter Huston contributed to a growing interest in performance, and he eventually transferred to Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, now known as Carnegie Mellon University. His studies there were interrupted in 1951 when his father died and he had to complete his father's contracting work, but he earned his bachelor's degree in 1955. During his time in Pittsburgh, he also trained at the Pittsburgh Playhouse, where he made his stage debut in 1949, and worked as a radio disc jockey at WLOA in Braddock, Pennsylvania.

After relocating to New York City, Peppard enrolled in the Actors Studio and studied the Method under Lee Strasberg. To support himself, he worked a range of jobs including taxi driver, radio station engineer, fencing instructor, and mechanic at a motorcycle repair shop. He appeared in summer stock in New England and performed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, for two seasons. In August 1955, he appeared in the play The Sun Dial, and in March 1956 he performed off Broadway in Beautiful Changes.

Peppard made his film debut in The Strange One, directed by Jack Garfein, which began filming in Florida in July 1956. The cast included Ben Gazzara, Geoffrey Horne, Pat Hingle, Arthur Storch, and Clifton James. The film was released in April 1957 and received some strong notices, with The New York Times describing Peppard as "resolute," though it was not a financial success. His second film role came in May 1958, when he was cast in a supporting part in the Korean War film Pork Chop Hill, directed by Lewis Milestone and released in 1959.

Peppard's Broadway career spanned from 1956 to 1958. His first Broadway credit was the drama Girls of Summer, which he joined in September 1956 under the direction of Jack Garfein. The production featured Shelley Winters and included a title song by Stephen Sondheim. Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times wrote that Peppard "expertly plays a sly, malicious dance teacher," though the show had only a brief run. His second Broadway appearance came in October 1958 in the comedy The Pleasure of His Company, starring and directed by Cyril Ritchard. Peppard played the boyfriend seeking to marry the character portrayed by Dolores Hart, who was Ritchard's daughter in the story. The New York Times called Peppard "admirable," and the production ran for a year. During the show's run, he successfully auditioned for MGM's Home from the Hill, and in February 1959 it was announced he would leave the production to fulfill a studio contract.

Home from the Hill, directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Robert Mitchum as Peppard's father, was a box office success, though its high production cost prevented it from being profitable. His next MGM film, The Subterraneans, an adaptation of Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel co-starring Leslie Caron, was a commercial failure. Peppard went on to achieve wider recognition with Breakfast at Tiffany's in 1961, in which he played struggling writer Paul Varjak opposite Audrey Hepburn. He later portrayed a character based on Howard Hughes in The Carpetbaggers in 1964.

On television, Peppard starred as Thomas Banacek, a millionaire insurance investigator, in the early-1970s mystery series Banacek. He later became widely known for playing Colonel John "Hannibal" Smith, the cigar-smoking leader of a renegade commando squad, in the 1980s action series The A-Team. Away from performing, Peppard was a licensed pilot who spent part of his 1966 honeymoon training to fly a Learjet in Wichita, Kansas. He died on May 8, 1994.