G. W. Bailey is an American actor. Although he has appeared in many dramatic roles, he may be best remembered for his "crusty" comedic characters such as 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 the role of Detective Lieutenant
Louie Provenza on
TNT's television crime drama The Closer, and its spinoff series Major Crimes, from 2005 to 2018.
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 Sgt. Luther Rizzo in M*A*S*H.[2] He also appeared as
Tom Berenger's sidekick in Rustler's Rhapsody (1985).
In the late 1990s, he starred in three of the seventeen television films and miniseries in the Bible Collection series produced for the
TNT television network, Solomon (1997), Jesus (1999), and Paul (2000).
From 2001 to 2019, Bailey served as the Executive Director of the
Sunshine Kids Foundation,[3] which provides trips and activities for hundreds of young cancer patients annually. He first volunteered with the organization after his goddaughter was diagnosed with
leukemia.[3]