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 "The family is devastated to
announce that this morning George Segal passed
away due to complications from bypass surgery,"
his wife Sonia Segal said in a statement on
Tuesday.
Charming and witty, Segal excelled in dramatic
and comedic roles, most recently playing
laid-back widower Albert "Pops" Solomon on the
comedy series "The Goldbergs."
"Today we lost a legend," Adam F. Goldberg, who
created the TV series that was based on his own
life, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.
"It was a true honor being a small part of
George Segal's amazing legacy. By pure fate, I
ended up casting the perfect person to play
Pops. Just like my grandfather, George was a kid
at heart with a magical spark," Goldberg added.
Segal's long time manager Abe Hoch said in a
statement that he would miss his friend's
"warmth, humor, camaraderie and friendship. He
was a wonderful human."
Segal's acting career began on the New York
stage and television in the early 1960s. He
quickly moved into films, playing an artist in
the star-studded ensemble drama "Ship of Fools"
and a scheming, wily American corporal in a
World War Two prisoner-of-war camp in "King Rat"
in 1965.
Two years later he earned an Academy Award
nomination as best supporting actor in the
harrowing, marital drama "Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?" with Burton and Elizabeth
Taylor.
"Elizabeth and Richard were the king and queen
of the world at that moment and there was a lot
of buzz about it," Segal told The Daily Beast in
2016. "For me, there was a great satisfaction of
being involved with it."
But it was in comedies that Segal cemented his
star status in a string of films in the 1970s
with A-list directors and co-stars such as
Jackson, who won an Oscar for her performance in
"A Touch of Class."
Segal played a lawyer in the 1970 dark comedy
"Where's Poppa" with Ruth Gordon, a gem thief
along with Robert Redford in 1972's "The Hot
Rock," an out-of-control gambler in Robert
Altman's "California Split" and a philandering
Beverly Hills divorce attorney in Paul
Mazursky's "Blume in Love" in 1973.
He starred opposite Jane Fonda in "Fun with Dick
and Jane," fell for the charms of Barbra
Streisand in "The Owl and the Pussycat" and
played Natalie Wood's husband in "The Last
Married Couple in America."
"I always try to find the humor and the irony in
whatever character I am playing because I think
of myself as a comedic actor," Segal said in an
interview with the online movie journal
filmtalk.org in 2016. "So that makes drama a lot
more fun for me by not taking it so seriously,
you know."
He credited an early appearance on the
late-night talk show "The Tonight Show with
Johnny Carson" for his switch to comedic roles.
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 "It was the first time that the
people who make movies saw me doing comedy and
having this funny interchange with Carson,"
Segal told the Orlando Sentinel in 1998.
He said he considered himself lucky in a
business that he compared to gambling because
you're always waiting for your lucky number, or
a great part, to come up.
He also had a life-long passion for the banjo
and performed at New York's Carnegie Hall in
1981 with his group, the Beverly Hills Unlisted
Jazz Band.
HITS AND MISSES
George Segal was born on Feb. 13, 1934, in Great
Neck, Long Island in New York. Although his
ancestors were Russian Jewish immigrants, his
family was not religious. In interviews Segal
summed up his Jewish experience as going to a
Passover Seder at Groucho Marx's house where the
comedian asked, "When do we get to the wine?"
Segal was a shy child but said he felt free on
the stage. After seeing the film "This Gun for
Hire" when he was 9 years old, he knew he wanted
to act. Following a stint in the Army and
graduating from Columbia University with a drama
degree, he made his film debut in "The Young
Doctors" in 1961.
Two of Segal's most acclaimed performances - in
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" and as Biff
Loman in the 1966 TV movie of Arthur Miller's
"Death of a Salesman" - were in roles that actor
Robert Redford had turned down.
"I owe Redford a lot. I think I may have thanked
him when we did ‘The Hot Rock,’” he told Variety
in 2017.
When Segal's film career waned in the 1980s he
appeared in TV films and series before returning
to the big screen in supporting roles that
included "Look Who's Talking" in 1989 and 1996's
"The Cable Guy" with Jim Carrey.
He found a younger generation of fans as a
women's magazine publisher in the hit TV comedy
"Just Shoot Me!," which ran from 1997 to 2003.
"He could make characters who should have been
jerks seem lovable," producer Steve Levitan, who
worked with Segal on “Just Shoot Me,” told
Variety in a 2017 interview.
Segal said he did not contemplate retirement
because people kept offering him interesting
roles.
“Being in your 70s is OK but, when you get to
your 80s, you get creaky," he told Variety.
"I’ve got my second wind — although I’m not
going as fast as I used to.”
(Additional reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing
by Bill Trott and Edwina Gibbs)
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