Oscar-nominated actor George Segal dies at age 87
Oscar-nominated The Goldbergs and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? star George Segal dies at age 87 ‘due to complications from bypass surgery’
- The Goldbergs star George Segal has died at the age of 87, his wife Sonia said
- ‘The family is devastated to announce that this morning George Segal passed away due to complications from bypass surgery,’ Sonia said in a statement
- He was known for his roles in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Just Shoot Me
- Segal was also famous for playing grandfather Albert ‘Pops’ Solomon on The Goldbergs since 2013
George Segal (pictured), the Oscar-nominated actor who sparred with Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, has died at the age of 87
George Segal, the Oscar-nominated actor who sparred with Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, romanced Glenda Jackson in A Touch of Class and won laughs in the TV sitcom The Goldbergs, has died at the age of 87, his wife Sonia said on Tuesday.
‘The family is devastated to announce that this morning George Segal passed away due to complications from bypass surgery,’ Sonia Segal said in a statement to entertainment outlets Variety and Deadline Hollywood.
Charming and witty, Segal excelled in dramatic and comedic roles and had a life-long passion for the banjo, which he learned as a young boy and would continue to play in bands along-side his acting career.
Segal starred in a great variety of acting roles throughout his 60-year career, but it was not without its hardships. In the 1980s, when roles dried up, he admitted to turning to drugs. He credits his second wife with helping him kick the habit, but he was faced with tragedy when she sadly died in 1996.
Segal’s acting began on the New York stage and television in the early 1960s, where he also met his first wife – Marion Segal Freed – in 1956, whom he was married to for 26 years.
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.
A native of Great Neck, New York, Segal’s most famous role was in a harrowing 1966 drama, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
The entire cast of the film, based on Edward Albee’s acclaimed play, was nominated for Academy Awards: Elizabeth Taylor and Burton for starring roles, Sandy Dennis and Segal for supporting performances. The women won Oscars, the men did not.
‘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.’
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To younger audiences, he was better known for playing magazine publisher Jack Gallo on the long-running NBC series Just Shoot Me from 1997 to 2003, and as grandfather Albert ‘Pops’ Solomon on the The Goldbergs (top right) since 2013
Segal received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on February 14, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. Pictured: (top) Actors Kevin Smith, David Spade (bottom) Hollywood Chamber of Commerce President & CEO Leron Gubler, actor George Segal and Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, Chair of the Board, Fariba Kalantari
Actor George Segal (holding a plaque, next to his wife Sonia to the left of him) and family members attend George Segal being honored with a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on February 14, 2017 in Hollywood
To younger audiences, he was better known for playing magazine publisher Jack Gallo on the long-running NBC series Just Shoot Me from 1997 to 2003, and as grandfather Albert ‘Pops’ Solomon on The Goldbergs since 2013.
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.
Segal played a lawyer in the 1970 dark comedy Where’s Poppa (pictured) with Ruth Gordon
Actors Ben Gazzara (left), George Segal (center) and Robert Vaughn (right), who were the stars of film The Bridge at Remagen relax during press conference at Imperial Hotel in Vienna on August 2, 1968
‘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.
‘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.
Segal was born on February 13, 1934, in Great Neck, Long Island in New York, where his father was a malt and hops dealer.
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. He was a musician, learning the trombone and the banjo, which he played in jazz bands in college and in later life along-side his acting career.
He also learned magic tricks, performing at children’s parties.
‘I was a hopeless magician, so I jazzed up the act,’ he told Life magazine. ‘I’d open up with a few fast tricks, then two friends would come on and we’d start throwing shaving-cream pies at each other.
‘The kids would always end up throwing cake at each other and everybody would have a wild time. Of course it was always a one-shot deal and we were never invited back,’ he recalled.
For school, he attended boarding school in Pennsylvania before moving on to Haverford College and finally graduating from Columba with a drama degree, taking him another step closer to his dream of being an actor that he held since he was nine years old after seeing the film This Gun for Hire.
In his younger years, he worked various unpaid jobs at Circle in the Square, an Off Broadway theater, such as a ticket-taker, usher and a soda vendor.
In 1956, he appeared in his first play – ‘The Iceman Cometh’ – and married his first wife of three, film editor Marion Segal Freed. They married onstage on a Monday night when the theater was dark. Shortly after that, he was drafted into the Army.
Following a short stint in the Army, he was discharged and graduated from Columbia University with a drama degree, he made his film debut in The Young Doctors in 1961.
With his Jewish surname and un-Hollywood nose, Segal was an unlikely movie star. But despite this, he resisted suggestions that he changed both.
‘I didn’t change my name because I don’t think George Segal is an unwieldy name. It’s a Jewish name, but not unwieldy. Nor do I think my nose is unwieldy,’ he said in an interview with the New York Times in 1971.
‘I think a nose job is unwieldy. I can always spot ‘em. Having a nose job says more about a person than not having one. You always wonder what that person would be like without a nose job.’
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.
A native of Great Neck, New York, Segal’s (left) most famous role was in a harrowing 1966 drama, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Segal played 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 (left) in 1973
Goldie Hawn and Segal appear together for the film The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox in 1976
‘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.
In 1983, he divorced his first wife, and married his second, named Linda Rogoff, a one-time manager of The Pointer Sisters whom he met at Carnegie Hall when he played the banjo with his band, called the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band.
Segal credited Rogoff with helping finally kick his drug habit that he admitted he turned to during a particularly tough period of his career in the 1980s.
‘I was disenchanted, I was turning in on myself, I was doing a lot of self-destructive things… there were drugs… I’m also sure I was guilty of spoiled behavior. I think it’s impossible when that star rush comes not to get a little full of yourself, which is what I was,’ he said, reflecting on his career.
In 1996, however, Rogoff died in a medical tragedy, which he opened up about in an interview with New York Daily News at the time.
Segal told the outlet that Rogoff died when she was taken to hospital, saying that she had a sore throat and was given penicillin, which it turned out she was allergic to. After a series of surgeries, she died at the hospital.
‘It went from bad to worse, and in the end her body couldn’t take it anymore. In fact, she had a condition called aplastic anemia,’ he told the outlet.
‘But all the hospital did was exacerbate the problem. It has been a terrible four years, and what happened fills me with a kind of rage.’
In the 1990s, Segal found a younger generation of fans as a women’s magazine publisher in the hit TV comedy Just Shoot Me!
‘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.’
Tributes began to pour in for Segal with some remembering him as a ‘true gem’ and a ‘legend’.
‘So sorry to hear about George Segal’s passing. We had such fun making Owl and the Pussycat,’ tweeted Barbra Streisand, who co-starred with Segal in the 1970 romantic comedy. ‘May he Rest In Peace.’
And James Gunn, writer and director of Marvel’s ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ films, wrote on Twitter that he was ‘a movie star who commanded our attention while still seeming like one of us.’
‘Shocked and saddened to hear of #GeorgeSegal passing away! From being on set of #JustShootMe to directing him on #Goldbergs, he was a true gem and great man. He will be missed!’ actress Melissa Joan Hart shared on Instagram.
Tributes began to pour in for Segal (pictured in 2017) with some remembering him as a ‘true gem’ and a ‘legend’
Adam F. Goldberg, the director of The Goldbergs, which is based off his childhood, tweeted: ‘Today we lost a legend. 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.’
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’.
The Goldbergs actress Wendi McLendon-Covey shared a photo of her hugging Segal with the caption: ‘Grateful.’
Actress Morgan Fairchild tweeted: ‘So sorry to hear of the passing of the wonderful George Segal! We did The Zany Adventures of Robin Hood together & I guested on Just Shoot Me. One of a kind and always a joy!’
‘We are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of George Segal,’ Sony Pictures Television – which produces ‘The Goldbergs’ – said in a statement. ‘He was a true icon and legend in this business and an integral member of our Sony family.’
Another shared: ‘George Segal has gone now. A career that kept going for 50+ because he loved it and he was great at it. RIP.’
Segal and his first wife Marion spent 26 years together until their divorce in 1983, and had two daughters together. He was married to Linda Rogoff, whom he met at Carnegie Hall when he played Banjo with his banned, from 1983 until her 1996 death.
In 1996, he married his former his former George School boarding school classmate Sonia Schultz Greenbaum, whom he stated with until his death in 2021. He is survived Sonia, and his two daughters, Polly and Elizabeth.
George Segal’s versatile acting career that spanned over 60 years
George Segal’s long film and television career spanned from the 1960s to the present day, during which he sparred with Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, romanced Glenda Jackson in A Touch of Class and won laughs in the TV sitcom The Goldbergs.
While younger viewers may know him as grandfather Albert ‘Pops’ Solomon in the ABC network TV series ‘The Goldbergs,’ his also career included starring roles in ‘The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox’ (1976) with Goldie Hawn, and ‘Fun With Dick and Jane’ (1977) with Jane Fonda.
Before finding his way to Hollywood success, in the 1950s Segal performed on Broadway and as part of an improvisational group called The Premise, which performed at a Bleeker Street coffee house. On Broadway, he appeared in Antony and Cleopatra, Gideon and Rattle of a Simple Man.
After signing to Colombia Pictures in 1961, his first major Hollywood role was in ‘The Young Doctors’ (1961), and later in ‘The Longest Day’ (1962) about the allied landing on Normandy beaches (D-Day) during World War II.
Pictured: George Segal with co-star Senta Berger in The Quiller Memorandum (1966), in which Segal played the title role of a secret service agent on assignment in Berlin
From 1965, he began to earn critical acclaim when he played an egocentric painter in Stanley Kramer’s drama ‘Ship of Fools’ which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
That same year, he played the title role of a scheming Prisoner of War in a war drama ‘King Rat’ (in a role originally meant for Frank Sinatra).
In other notable film appearances, he played the title role of a secret service agent on assignment in Berlin in The Quiller Memorandum (1966), an Algerian paratrooper who becomes a leader of the FLN in Lost Command (1966), and a gangster in The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967).
He also appeared in several prominent TV films, such as Death of a Salesman in 1966, The Desperate Hours in 1967 and in an adaptation of Of Mice and Men in 1968.
Segal was loaned to Warner Brothers for the now-classic 1966 adaption of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?’, in which he played a young professor alongside two megastars of the time, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
The film received an Academy Award nomination for best picture, and was later selected for the national film registry. It is is arguably Segal’s best known role, and for it, he was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe.
That same year, Segal released his debut LP, titled ‘The Yama Yama Man’.
Segal continued to be busy with roles in the following decade, during which he worked with a number of notable filmmakers, across a variety of genres.
Segal (left) starred in the now-classic 1966 adaption of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?’, in which he played a young professor alongside two megastars of the time, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (right)
He starred in Carl Reiner’s dark comedy ‘Where’s Poppa?’ in 1970, played the lead role in Sidney Lumet’s ‘Bye Bye Braverman’ in 1968 and starred with Robert Redford in Peter Yates’s diamond heist comedy ‘The Hot Rock’ in 1972.
He also starred as the title role of a midlife crisis victim in Paul Mazursky’s romantic comedy ‘Blume in Love’ in 1973, and starred alongside Elliott Gould as a gambling addict in Robert Altman’s classic ‘California Split’ in 1974, regarded by some to be the best gambling film of all time.
In one of his most successful roles, Segal won a Golden Globe award (his second during his career) for his role of a a philandering husband in Melvin Frank’s in ‘A Touch of Class’ (1973) with Glenda Jackson. Jackson won an Oscar for her performance.
His music career also continued, and in 1974 Segal’s band, The Imperial Jazz Band, released an album called A Touch of Ragtime, in which Segal played the banjo, and in 1976 he co-hosed the Academy Awards.
During the 1980s, however, Segal received fewer prominent roles, and instead starred more frequently in television films, as well as some short-live TV series, before returning to Broadway for a short stint.
He headlined the late-1980s ABC detective drama Murphy’s Law, the 1987 CBS comedy Take Five and TV Land sitcom Retired at 35.
But after a relatively quiet period, in the 1990s Segal was able to reestablish himself as a successful character actor, working with directors such as Mark Rydell, Gus Van Sant, Barbra Streisand, David O. Russell, Randal Kleiser, and Ben Stiller, and found success on television.
Segal (left) later starred as Albert ‘Pops’ Solomon, the eccentric but lovable grandfather in ‘The Goldbergs,’ which began its run in 2013 and is still in production to this day
Later in his career Segal became known to new and old audiences for his television role in NBC sitcom ‘Just Shoot Me!’ (1997-2003), his most prominent in years, where he played a successful yet often oblivious owner and publisher of a New York City fashion magazine.
This ran for seven seasons and 146 episodes, and earned him the Golden Globe nomination for best actor.
Segal later starred as Albert ‘Pops’ Solomon, the eccentric but lovable grandfather in ‘The Goldbergs,’ which began its run in 2013 and is still in production to this day.
In 2017, Segal received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in the television category.
