Carroll O'Connor Movies and Career Information

John Carroll O'Connor (August 2, 1924 – June 21, 2001) best known as Carroll O'Connor, was an American actor, producer and director whose television career spanned four decades. Known at first for playing the role of Major General Colt in the 1970 cult movie, Kelly's Heroes, he later found fame as the bigoted workingman Archie Bunker, the main character in the 1970s CBS television sitcoms All in the Family (1971 to 1979) and Archie Bunker's Place (1979 to 1983). O'Connor later starred in the NBC television crime drama In the Heat of the Night from 1988 to 1995, where he played the role of Police Chief William (Bill) Gillespie from 1988 to 1994, and Sheriff Gillespie in 1995. At the end of his career in the late 1990s, he played the father of Jamie Stemple Buchman (Helen Hunt) on Mad About You. O'Connor, an Irish Catholic American, was the eldest of three sons born in Manhattan, New York to Elise Patricia and Edward Joseph O'Connor, who was a New York City lawyer. Both of his brothers were doctors; Hugh, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1961, and Robert, a psychiatrist in New York City. O'Connor spent much of his youth in Elmhurst and Forest Hills, Queens, in the same borough in