George Peppard

A fascinating retrospective on the life and career of one of Hollywood's most enigmatic actors, George Peppard.

George Peppard covers the life and career of one of Hollywood's more enigmatic and forgotten players, an A-list star and his career in such productions as Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), How the West Was Won (1963), and The Carpetbaggers (1964), and again nearly two decades later in The A-Team (1983-87). The book highlights contretemps on Breakfast at Tiffany's; when the main director of How the West Was Won was threatened with removal from the picture and MGM considered not making the final train shoot-out segment until Peppard threatened to walk off the picture; and in another virtually unknown episode where actors were almost killed in a train accident and Peppard's stunt double, lost a leg and an eye.

Peppard's bad boy reputation - mostly for unsolicited script-writing, advice for directors, and an ingrained distrust of producers - also was reflected in untoward opinions of him from his leading ladies who disliked him enough to say so in no uncertain terms. But another one, Elizabeth Ashley, married him - twice. Peppard married five times, and the alimony payments and other debts, plus increased drinking, sent him to rock-bottom in 1978, from where he believed dinner theatre might be his final chapter.

The actor was press-shy, tough to pin down. Jerry Roberts explores Peppard's history candidly, with the highest estimation of Peppard as a man and a performer in mind, someone known for loyalty and a work ethic, as a ladies' man and prodigious drinker, as a loner who didn't fit anyone's idea of a Hollywood joiner or glad-hander, who kept his family out of the limelight. This is about an actor - much more than the star - which is how the self-contained, independent Peppard saw himself.