George Segal, genial Hollywood major guy of Seventies cinema

Dancing Trousers

George Segal, actor. Born: February 13 1934 in New York Metropolis. Died: March 23 2021 in Santa Rosa, California, aged 87.



George Segal wearing a suit and tie smiling and looking at the camera


© George Segal pictured in 2018 (Image: Getty)


It could be complicated to think now, but George Segal was once one particular of the major stars in the Hollywood firmament, sharing top billing in the 1970s with Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. Segal specialised in self-centred people having difficulties with modern day lifetime, enjoy and the notion of motivation, but eventually superior-hearted and lovable. It was proposed that he was the quite epitome of Modern day Western Person.

“Segal has appear to stand for, in a genial and a little ironic way, the present day American urban man… cynical but concerned, simple going-but tricky-operating, capable to use humour as a defence when very little else will operate,” wrote critic Ken Wlaschin in The World’s Good Film Stars in 1979.

Segal did some heavyweight drama in his time. He received an Oscar nomination co-starring along with Richard Burton, who he liked, and Elizabeth Taylor, on whom he was significantly less eager, in the 1966 domestic movie Who’s Frightened of Virginia Woolf? And he starred in Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 tv drama The Lie.

He gravitated from heavyweight drama to knockabout passionate comedies, actively playing opposite Streisand in The Owl and the Pussycat and Glenda Jackson in A Contact of Class, the movie for which Jackson received her 2nd finest actress Academy Award.

Like some of his people, Segal appeared to have settled for the quick selections, cosy convenience somewhat than naked psychological honesty. But then he pulled out of the film 10. Producer Blake Edwards hired Dudley Moore and sued Segal. The movie was enormous, Moore’s star rose and Segal’s job was never ever very the very same.

Subsequently he appeared in occasional supporting roles in significant feature movies, actively playing Kirstie Alley’s lover in Appear Who’s Conversing, and worked more and more in tv with current long-managing roles in the American sitcoms Just Shoot Me! And The Goldbergs .

Born into a wealthy Jewish family members in New York Town in 1934, Segal confirmed an early aptitude for showbiz, amusing older people with his magic act and graduating to singing with a jazz band in significant university. Get the job done as a janitor and usher supported him even though he made twin occupations as a jazz musician and an actor, appearing in off-Broadway plays.

In the mid-1950s his showbiz vocation was briefly interrupted by a spell in the military. In 1961 he appeared as a health care provider in the clinical movie The Youthful Medical professionals, along with Ben Gazzara and Fredric March, and he appeared on Broadway in the Paddy Chayefsky participate in Gideon, once more with March. His film career took off in 1965 just after he landed the starring position in King Rat, playing a POW, who controls the black market place in a Japanese camp, buying and selling in “mouse deer meat”, which turns out to be rats, which have fed on lifeless prisoners. Segal’s presence created the drama a very little more palatable and delivered an early indicator of a rascally, but redeeming appeal.

He went on to play a naive, younger tutorial caught in the crossfire amongst Burton and Taylor in Who’s Scared of Virginia Woolf?, Mike Nichols’s movie of Edward Albee’s portrait of relationship as a battlefield. All 4 customers of the cast gained Oscar nominations and the groundbreaking use of potent language compelled an overhaul of American movie censorship.

Segal’s most outrageous film, however, was the 1970 black comedy Where’s Poppa, in which he performed a attorney with an unnaturally possessive mother, performed by Ruth Gordon. She shocks the nurse to whom Segal has taken a glow by pulling down her son’s trousers and smothering his bare bottom with kisses.

By 1972 his standing was this sort of that he could action into Paul Newman’s erstwhile job as Robert Redford’s buddy in How to Steal a Diamond in 4 Uneasy Classes. On the poster Segal is demonstrated working, shoulder to shoulder with Redford, and they share equal billing.

Segal produced one more buddy movie of sorts, when he appeared as a gambler who inbound links up with Elliott Gould in Robert Altman’s California Break up, but it was his partnerships with some of Hollywood’s major woman stars that had been arguably to confirm most noteworthy. As properly as co-starring with Barbra Streisand and Glenda Jackson, he appeared with Goldie Hawn in The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox, Jane Fonda in Enjoyment with Dick and Jane and Natalie Wooden in The Very last Married Few in The us.

He had his share of flops and poor possibilities, but no far more than other lots of other stars, who bounced back. It has been recommended that he priced himself out of the market place. Or perhaps he experienced just been way too prosperous in the way in which he arrived to stand for the American urban male of the 1970s and producers wanted an individual else for the 1980s.

In 1983 he was lessened to appearing in a tv sequel to Looking for Mr Goodbar. He built a comeback at the close of the 1980s in Seem Who’s Speaking. By this time his switch as the philanderer who can not commit, even with a toddler on the way, appeared sleazy, somewhat than charming.

He also invested a good deal of time on his other enthusiasm, actively playing the banjo in a jazz band, and even done at New York’s Carnegie Hall.

In 1996 he was Matthew Broderick’s father in The Cable Dude and Ben Stiller’s dad in Flirting with Catastrophe. That same calendar year he was reunited with Streisand in The Mirror Has Two Faces – Streisand was still a intimate direct, but this time round Jeff Bridges was her co-star.

His initially relationship ended in divorce in the early 1980s. His next spouse died in 1996. He then met a previous childhood sweetheart and married for a 3rd time.He is survived by his third spouse Sonia and by two daughters from his initially relationship.

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