George Albert Shearing was born on August 13, 1919, in Battersea, London, the youngest of nine children, and was blind from birth. His father delivered coal and his mother cleaned trains in the evenings. He started piano at three and had four years of formal training at the Linden Lodge School for the Blind, then turned down several scholarships to play piano and accordion at a Lambeth pub, the Mason's Arms, for 25 shillings a week. He joined Claude Bampton's all-blind orchestra, learned jazz from records by Teddy Wilson and Fats Waller, and through the critic Leonard Feather made his first BBC broadcast and, in 1937, his first recordings. He joined Harry Parry's popular band in 1940, and around 1942 Stéphane Grappelli, who was staying in wartime London, recruited him for a band that played at Hatchett's restaurant in Piccadilly and then toured from 1943. Shearing also worked in George Evans's Saxes 'n' Sevens and won six consecutive Melody Maker polls as the country's top pianist.

Feather urged him to try America, and Shearing settled in New York in 1947. He absorbed bebop quickly, played at the Hickory House, worked with the Oscar Pettiford trio, and led a quartet with the clarinetist Buddy DeFranco that ran into contract trouble because Shearing was signed to MGM and DeFranco to Capitol. In 1949 he formed the first George Shearing Quintet: Marjorie Hyams on vibraphone, Chuck Wayne on guitar, John Levy on bass, and Denzil Best on drums. Wayne was later replaced on guitar by Toots Thielemans, who played with the group from 1953 to 1959. The group recorded for Discovery, Savoy and MGM, and its MGM recording of "September in the Rain" sold more than 900,000 copies in the United States alone. Booked into Birdland, the quintet made Shearing's American reputation, and Jack Kerouac heard it there and wrote about the experience in On the Road.

The quintet's signature sound came from his piano voicing: block chords in five parts, with the melody doubled an octave lower, while the vibraphone doubled the top line and the guitar the bottom. The technique, usually called locked hands, is generally credited to the organist Milt Buckner. In 1952 Shearing wrote "Lullaby of Birdland" for Morris Levy, the owner of the club, who wanted a theme to be played every hour on a Birdland-sponsored radio show; Shearing later said he composed it in about ten minutes, and the quintet recorded it on July 17, 1952. George David Weiss added lyrics, and Sarah Vaughan had a hit with it in 1954 on a recording with Clifford Brown. His 1949 composition "Conception" was reworked by Miles Davis, whose arrangement was recorded on his first LP, The New Sounds. The group also became a pioneer of small-combo Afro-Cuban jazz. Cal Tjader joined in 1953 when Joe Roland left, and he and the bassist Al McKibbon encouraged Shearing to add Cuban percussionists; the conga player Armando Peraza, introduced by McKibbon, stayed about twelve years and wrote more than twenty pieces for the group, and Willie Bobo and Mongo Santamaría also played in it.

Shearing became a naturalized American citizen in 1956 and recorded for Capitol from 1955 to 1969. The label issued a long run of themed albums, among them Latin Escapade, Black Satin (arranged by Billy May), Velvet Carpet, Burnished Brass, Latin Lace, and White Satin. Vocalists made records with the quintet: Dakota Staton on In the Night (1958), Peggy Lee on Beauty and the Beat! (May 1959, sold as a live recording from a Miami disc jockey convention but made in the studio with applause added), Nancy Wilson on The Swingin's Mutual! (1961), and Nat King Cole on Nat King Cole Sings/George Shearing Plays (1962), on which Shearing also arranged. In 1961 he made an album for Jazzland with the Montgomery Brothers, the family trio that included guitarist Wes Montgomery. The quintet's chairs turned over often: Percy Brice, Emil Richards, Warren Chiasson, Vernel Fournier and others passed through, vibraphonist Gary Burton toured with the group in 1963 and went on to write the pieces on Out of the Woods, and guitarist Joe Pass was a member from 1965 to 1967.

From 1970 Shearing began to phase out the quintet, and he disbanded it in 1978. He ran a label of his own, Sheba, for a few years and recorded trio and duo albums for MPS in Germany, among them The Reunion (1976), made with Grappelli, bassist Andy Simpkins and drummer Rusty Jones. After signing with Concord Jazz in 1979 he enjoyed a renaissance, recording duo albums with bassist Brian Torff, Carmen McRae, Marian McPartland, Jim Hall, Hank Jones and Ernestine Anderson, and six albums with Mel Tormé between 1982 and 1991. The first two, An Evening with George Shearing & Mel Tormé and Top Drawer, brought Tormé consecutive Grammy Awards for best male jazz vocal performance in 1983 and 1984. His bassists in these years included Don Thompson, who joined in 1982 and stayed about five years, and then Neil Swainson, who remained with him until the end of his career. He moved to Telarc in 1992, recorded mostly in duo and trio settings, and appeared as a guest on Tito Puente's Mambo Diablo (1985).

He received the Ivor Novello Award for lifetime achievement in 1993, was invested as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire at Buckingham Palace in November 1996, and was knighted in 2007. He played for Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan and at a Royal Command Performance, and in 2004 Concord issued the two-disc Lullabies of Birdland: A Musical Autobiography alongside his memoir, Lullaby of Birdland. Shearing was married to Trixie Bayes from 1941 to 1973, with whom he had a daughter, Wendy, and in 1975 he married the singer Ellie Geffert; in his last years they divided the year between New York and Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire. After a fall at home he retired from regular performing, and he passed away at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York on February 14, 2011, at the age of 91, of congestive heart failure.

Shearing's playing combined swing, bop and a classical sense of harmony. His solos often drew on Satie, Delius and Debussy, and he played with symphony orchestras in the 1950s and 1960s. AllMusic lists Fats Waller, Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson, Erroll Garner, Art Tatum and Bud Powell among his influences, and Hank Jones was, by Shearing's own account, one of his strongest. The locked-hands quintet made him one of the most popular jazz acts of the 1950s and early 1960s, and that popularity cost him some critical respect; AllMusic's Richard S. Ginell argues that it also obscured his role as a pioneer of Afro-Cuban small-group jazz. In his later duo and solo work he played in a more conventional manner while keeping the same light, refined touch. Younger pianists have named him as a first model: according to their profiles, Roger Kellaway bought the sheet music to his "I'll Remember April" at eleven, Diane Schuur taught herself from one of his records at twelve and later met him, Amedeo Tommasi learned to imitate him by ear, and Shin Kwan-woong found a Shearing record first when he went looking for jazz in Seoul.