About
George William Bailey (born August 27, 1944) is an American actor. His roles include Staff Sergeant Luther Rizzo in M*A*S*H (TV series 1979–1983), Lieutenant/Captain Thaddeus Harris in the Police Academy films (1984–1994), and Captain Felix Maxwell in Mannequin (1987). He played Detective Lieutenant Louie Provenza on TNT’s television crime drama The Closer and its spin-off series Major Crimes from 2005 to 2018.
Bailey was born in Port Arthur, Texas, where he went to Thomas Jefferson High School with Janis Joplin and Jimmy Johnson. He started college at Lamar University in nearby Beaumont and transferred to Texas Tech University in Lubbock.
Bailey left college and spent the mid-1960s working at local theater companies before moving to California in the mid-1970s. He broke into television with a small recurring role as a crime scene police officer on the short-lived detective show Harry O. He then landed one-shot episodic roles on television programs of the day such as Starsky and Hutch and Charlie’s Angels. His film debut was in A Force of One (1979), an early Chuck Norris film. By the late 1970s, he got his breakout role as the conniving, cigar-chomping goldbricker…
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