Cool Hand Luke star George Kennedy dead

George Kennedy, the Oscar-winning star of Cool Hand Luke and the Naked Gun comedy movies, has died at the age of 91, his family announced.

The burly American actor — famed for his tough guy roles before playing against type later in his career — died on Sunday morning in Boise, Idaho, grandson Cory Schenkel said on his Facebook page.

“I have travelled on many business trips and movie shoots with my grandpa... I have created so many great memories and I will enjoy them for life,” he said. “While I am extremely sad that they are both gone — my grandma (on) September 14 and my grandpa this morning — I am grateful for the life, memories and knowledge they shared with me.”

Kennedy’s local newspaper the Idaho Statesman reported that the actor had died of natural causes, citing Canyon county coroner Vicki DeGeus-Morris. “He had a history of heart problems,” it quoted her as saying.

Kennedy often played second billing to the likes of Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, Gregory Peck, James Stewart, Robert Mitchum and, on several occasions, Clint Eastwood. He won a best supporting actor Oscar as a sadistic chain gang prisoner in 1968 for Cool Hand Luke and starred in more than 200 films and TV series, including disaster movies Airport 1975 and Earthquake, and long-running soap opera Dallas. He was best known in his later career for playing bumbling police captain Ed Hocken in The Naked Gun spoof cop series, from 1988 to 1994.

Kennedy said his acting ambitions were cemented when he was a young child. “I remember listening to a radio programme me when I was young and it made me feel good and I remember telling my mom that I wanted to make people feel the way this radio program made me feel,” Kennedy said in 1995. “I got some great breaks, and I wound up being an actor.” His film career began to take flight in the early 1960s. He starred in 1963’s Charade, a whodunit that features Kennedy, Cary Grant, James Coburn and Walter Matthau seeking out the $250,000 they suspect was left behind by Audrey Hepburn’s dead husband. His other acting credits in the 1960s included The Dirty Dozen and Guns of the Magnificent Seven.