George Jefferson

George Jefferson
George (front) with wife Louise and son Lionel.
First appearance	"Henry's Farewell" (on All in the Family)
Created by	Norman Lear
Portrayed by	Sherman Hemsley
Information
Occupation	Dry-cleaning business owner
Family	William T. Jefferson (father) Olivia Jefferson (mother) Henry Jefferson (brother) Ruby Jefferson (sister-in-law) Raymond Jefferson (nephew) Jessica Jefferson (granddaughter) Maxine Mills (sister-in-law) Jason Mills (nephew) Julie Williams (niece) Jenny Willis Jefferson (daughter-in-law) Harold Mills (father-in-law)
Spouse(s)	Louise Mills (1952)
Children	Lionel Jefferson (son)

George Jefferson is a fictional character played by Sherman Hemsley on the American television sitcoms All in the Family (from 1973 until 1975) and its spin-off The Jeffersons (1975–1985), in which he serves as the program's protagonist. He is the only character to appear in all 253 episodes of The Jeffersons.

George Jefferson was born in Harlem in 1929, an ambitious African-American entrepreneur who started and managed a successful chain of seven dry cleaning stores in New York City. The only background on the Jefferson family is that they were Alabama sharecroppers. In a very early episode, George's wife Louise makes mention of a conversation she had with George's father after she and George were married about the Jeffersons family roots. However, the show's writers later applied a retroactive change in the continuity of George's father, such that he had died when George was 10 years old. This left George to take care of his mother; therefore, George was unable to complete high school. He was a cook in the US Navy during the Korean War. He began dating Louise when they were teenagers and married her upon his discharge from the navy.

Before the Jeffersons' store opening, the family lived in a derelict section of Harlem. George had worked as a janitor, and Louise as a housekeeper (in one episode, as Louise says that the building's white janitor was properly referred to as a "custodian", George says: "Well, whenever a man of our race has that job, he is a janitor!").