Georges Arvanitas was born in Marseille on June 13, 1931, the son of Greek immigrants from Constantinople. He started piano at four, trained as a classical pianist and moved to jazz as a teenager. He played in amateur orchestras around Marseille and accompanied American musicians passing through, among them Don Byas, Buck Clayton and James Moody.

In 1952, during his military service near Versailles, he began playing in the clubs of Paris. He stood in now and then for the pianist André Persiani at Le Tabou, then became the regular pianist at the Club Saint-Germain and later at the Blue Note, where he backed traditional-jazz players such as Mezz Mezzrow, Albert Nicholas and Bill Coleman. Alongside the club work he was a busy studio musician, accompanying singers and pop acts from Tino Rossi and Sheila to Claude François, Les Chats sauvages and Les Chaussettes noires. AllMusic says he earned the nickname "Georges Une Prise" for getting things right in one take, and that the composer Michel Legrand liked his playing and used him on soundtrack recordings. AllMusic and Discogs also credit him with the Hammond organ on Serge Gainsbourg's 1969 hit "Je t'aime... moi non plus".

His own records began in 1958. That year Pretoria issued two EPs of French song repertoire under his name, one on Charles Trénet and one on Charles Aznavour, and the trio LP 3 A.M., on which the American players Doug Watkins (bass) and Art Taylor (drums) are credited; French Wikipedia dates the session to September 10, 1958. Cocktail for Three followed for Pretoria, recorded on March 4, 1959 at the Studio des Victoires in Paris with the bassist Gene Taylor and the drummer Louis Hayes. In 1960 he led a quintet on Soul Jazz for Columbia (FPX 193), with François Jeanneau on tenor saxophone, Bernard Vitet on bugle, Michel Gaudry on bass and Daniel Humair on drums, playing tunes associated with Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and Sonny Rollins, and in the same year he received the Académie du Jazz's Prix Django-Reinhardt.

He spent several months in New York in 1964 and 1965 and again in 1966. Discogs credits him on piano on Yusef Lateef's Psychicemotus (Impulse!), recorded on July 21 and 22, 1965 at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, with Reggie Workman on bass and James Black on drums, and on the trumpeter Ted Curson's The New Thing & the Blue Thing (Atlantic, 1965), with Bill Barron on tenor saxophone.

Back in Paris in 1966 he began working at the club Le Caméléon with the bassist Jacky Samson and the drummer Charles Saudrais. The three stayed together for about 28 years as the Trio Arvanitas and became the house rhythm section for American musicians visiting France, among them Dizzy Gillespie, Chet Baker, Coleman Hawkins, Dexter Gordon, Ben Webster, Sonny Stitt, Anita O'Day and David Murray. Many of those meetings reached disc. Samson and Saudrais are the rhythm section on Pop Wine with Ted Curson (Futura, 1971), Anita O'Day's In Berlin (MPS, 1971), Ben Webster's Autumn Leaves (Futura, 1972), Parisian Concert with Dexter Gordon (Futura, 1973), and Pepper Adams's Live in Europe (Impro, 1977). In December 1977 the trio recorded Shouting the Blues with the saxophonist Frank Wright, co-billed to Wright and Arvanitas.

The trio's own albums are on several French labels. The Futura label issued In Concert (1970) and the double album Live Again, recorded in Levallois on January 13, 1973 with Gérard Terronès producing and Jef Gilson mixing. Saravah's five-LP set Pianos Puzzle (1970) gave one disc each to Arvanitas, Michel Graillier, René Urtreger and Maurice Vander. Arvanitas's disc, with Samson and Saudrais, carries "Three of Us" and "Space Ballad", and is also issued as a single LP, Three of Us. AFA released Les Classiques du Jazz (1970), a Porgy and Bess (1973) and the double album Anniversary (1976). His Hammond organ work includes Orgue Hammond (Carrere, 1986) with Samson, Saudrais and the guitarist Jean-Claude Olivier.

Later records include Round About Midnight (Carrere, 1986, with Saudrais and the bassist Stéphane Persiani), Bird of Paradise (1988), Plays George Gershwin (1993) and Plays Duke Ellington (recorded in March 1993, issued in 1995), both with Luigi Trussardi and Christophe Marguet, the solo album My Favorite Piano Songs (Black and Blue, 1997) and Rencontre (Columbia, 1998), made with Ira Coleman, Joe Chambers and, on one track, the Japanese singer Keiko Lee. One of his last albums is Little Florence, recorded in Paris in April 2000 with Samson and the drummer Richard Portier. French Wikipedia records that he was made a commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1999. AllMusic says failing health made him retire in 2003. He died on September 25, 2005, aged 74.

Bud Powell was his main influence, and he also took harmonic ideas from Bill Evans. Wikipedia describes a command of piano history that let him play everything from ragtime to modern jazz, with a personal, swinging style, and the repertoire on his records bears that out: bebop and hard bop standards, Monk, Coltrane and Ellington, Gershwin, and French popular songs. AllMusic lists his styles as hard bop, soul jazz, bop and swing, and Discogs files Soul Jazz under hard bop and several of his 1970s and 1980s albums under soul jazz, swing or modal jazz. The trio's records with Gordon, Webster, Adams and Curson show the other side of that career, the accompanist who let visiting soloists lead.