[3] He idolized pilot Speed Holman,[3][7] who, Hill once explained, "used to make his approach to the spectators at state fairs flying past the grandstand upside down.

[5] Airplanes featured prominently in his later films and are frequently crashed as well — in Slaughterhouse-Five, The World According to Garp and especially The Great Waldo Pepper which showed the influence on Hill of pilots like Speed Holman.

[8] During World War II, Hill served in the United States Marine Corps as a transport pilot with VMR-152 in the South Pacific.

[4] The outbreak of the Korean War resulted in his recall to active duty service for 18 months as a night fighter pilot, attaining the rank of major.

[9] Other sources say his thesis was never completed because he became sidetracked by the Irish theater,[4] making his stage debut as a walk-on part in 1947[3][10][11] at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin,[5] with Cyril Cusack's company in a production of George Bernard Shaw's The Devil's Disciple.

In 1952 he featured in a supporting role in the Hollywood movie Walk East on Beacon,[4] and appeared in episodes of Lux Video Theatre including "The Doctor's Wife", "Man at Bay" and "Masquerade".

During his military service at Cherry Point, he had had to be 'talked down' by a ground controller at Atlanta airport, an incident that led to his writing the screenplay.

[4] He later directed episodes of Ponds Theater ("Time of the Drought"), and Lux Video Theatre ("The Creaking Gate", "Not All Your Tears", "The Happy Man".)

In addition he did "Man on the White Horse", "Carnival", and "A Real Fine Cutting Edge" with George Peppard for The Kaiser Aluminum Hour.

He directed some famous episodes of Playhouse 90 including "The Helen Morgan Story" (1957), "The Last Clear Chance" (1958), "Child of Our Time" (1958), and "Judgment at Nuremberg" (1959).

[19] He was meant to follow with an adaptation of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer at MGM for producer John Houseman but it was not made.

Hill rebuilt his Hollywood reputation with the Julie Andrews musical Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) produced by Ross Hunter.

[26] Instead, Hill had a huge commercial success with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), based on a script by William Goldman and starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

[5] The success of Butch Cassidy and The Sting meant that, for a time, Hill was the only director in history to have made two of the top 10 money-making films.

"[28] The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) was based on a story by Hill, with a script by William Goldman and starring Robert Redford.

I imagined it to be a little cruder, more low-brow humor, rougher and more like the movies Chevy was doing at the time, but George was a classy guy and he wasn’t going to do that ...

[9] After his second return to civilian life, Hill bought an open-cockpit Waco biplane built in 1930, which he retained until about ten years before his death.

[3] Hill died from complications of Parkinson's disease at his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on December 27, 2002, aged 81.