George Peppard

Peppard came out of live television drama and into the studio system just as its confidence was going, and for about five years he looked like the next great American leading man. Pork Chop Hill in 1959 and Home from the Hill in 1960 put him in serious pictures. Breakfast at Tiffany's in 1961 made him famous as the struggling writer Paul Varjak opposite Audrey Hepburn, and How the West Was Won the following year set him inside a widescreen epic as Zeb Rawlings.

Then came The Carpetbaggers in 1964, where he played a character modelled on Howard Hughes, and a long run of war pictures: The Victors, Operation Crossbow, The Blue Max, Tobruk. The Blue Max is the one that survives, and Lt. Bruno Stachel is the clearest look at what Peppard was actually good at. He was cold. The camera liked him and he gave it very little back, which made him a strange romantic lead and an excellent study of men calculating something in private.

The films stopped coming first. He moved to television as the millionaire insurance investigator Banacek in the early 1970s, then took what was going: The Groundstar Conspiracy, Damnation Alley, Battle Beyond the Stars, Race for the Yankee Zephyr. In 1983 The A-Team handed him Col. John Hannibal Smith, with the cigar and the disguises, and that is the role most people picture. He played it for laughs and enjoyed himself, which was generous of a man who had once been on the other track. He died in 1994.