George Segal

Early life

Segal was born in Great Neck, New York, the son of Fannie Blanche Segal (née Bodkin) and George Segal, Sr., a malt and hop agent. He is the youngest of four children; oldest brother, John, who worked in the hopes brokerage business and was an innovator in the cultivation of new hop varieties, middle brother, Fred, a screenwriter, and a six-year-old sister, Greta, who died of pneumonia before Segal was born.

Segal's family was Jewish, but he was raised in a secular household. A paternal great-grandfather ran for governor of Massachusetts as a socialist. When asked if he had a bar mitzvah, Segal stated: "I'm afraid not. I went to a Passover Seder at Groucho Marx's once and he kept saying, 'When do we get to the wine?' So that's my Jewish experience. I went to a friend's bar mitzvah, and that was the only time I was in Temple Beth Shalom. Jewish life wasn't happening that much at the time. People's car tires were slashed in front of the temple. I was once kicked down a flight of stairs by some kids from the local parochial school".

All four of Segal's grandparents were Russian immigrants. His maternal grandparents changed their surname from Slobodkin to Bodkin. He first became interested in acting at the age of nine, when he saw Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire. He states: "I started off with the ukulele when I was a kid in Great Neck. A friend had a red Harold Teen model; it won my heart. When I got to high school, I realized you couldn't play in a band with a ukulele, so I moved on to the four-string banjo."

When his father died in 1947, Segal moved to New York City with his mother. He graduated from George School in 1951, and attended Haverford College. He graduated from Columbia College of Columbia University in 1955 with a Bachelor of Arts in performing arts and drama. He was drafted into the United States Army in 1956. He studied at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen.

Film

Originally a stage actor and musician, Segal appeared in several minor films in the early 1960s in addition to the well-known World War II film The Longest Day (1962). He was signed to a Columbia Pictures contract in 1961, making his film debut in The Young Doctors and appearing in the television series Naked City. In 1965, he was a co-recipient of the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year for his supporting role in The New Interns (1964).

In 1965, Segal was one of the stars of Stanley Kramer's acclaimed ensemble drama Ship of Fools, playing an egocentric painter, and played the title role as a scheming P.O.W. in King Rat (a role originally meant for Frank Sinatra), receiving some acclaim for both performances. He went on to play an Algerian paratrooper captured at Dien Bien Phu, who leaves the French army to become a leader of the FLN, in Lost Command (1966). He was loaned to Warner Bros.for Mike Nichols' classic adaptation of the Edward Albee play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1967). He played the young faculty member, Nick, a role for which he was nominated for an Oscar.

For the next decade and onwards, Segal received many notable film roles and headlined several acclaimed films by notable filmmakers. He starred in Carl Reiner's celebrated dark comedy Where's Poppa? (1970), played the lead role in Sydney Lumet's Bye Bye Braverman (1968), starred in Peter Yates' heist comedy The Hot Rock (1972), played a comically unfaithful husband in Melvin Frank's A Touch of Class (1973), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, starred as the titular midlife crisis victim in Paul Mazursky's acclaimed romantic comedy Blume in Love (1973), and starred as a gambling addict in Robert Altman's classic California Split (1974). For A Touch of Class, he won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, which was the second Golden Globe of his career.

During this time, he received many other leading roles. He appeared as a British secret service agent in The Quiller Memorandum (1966), a Cagney-esque gangster in The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1967), a perplexed police detective in No Way to Treat a Lady (1968), a war-weary platoon commander in The Bridge at Remagen (1969), a bookworm in The Owl and the Pussycat (1970), a man laying waste to his marriage in Loving (1970), a hairdresser-turned-junkie in Born to Win (1971), a dangerous computer scientist in The Terminal Man (1974), a card shark in The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox (1976), a suburbanite-turned-bank robber in Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), a heroic ride inspector in Rollercoaster (1977), and a faux gourmet in Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978).

Segal famously pulled out of the lead role in Blake Edwards' hit comedy 10 (1979) and, with a few exceptions in films such as Carbon Copy (1981), subsequently received fewer prominent roles in the 1980s. Near the end of the decade, however, Segal began to reestablish himself as a successful character actor and has since performed in supporting roles in a number of prominent films, including Look Who's Talking (1989), For the Boys (1991), To Die For (1995), The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), Flirting with Disaster (1996), The Cable Guy (1996), 2012 (2009), and Love & Other Drugs (2010).

Television

Segal starred as Biff Loman in a notable television adaptation of Death of a Salesman in 1966 and also starred as George in a 1968 adaptation of Of Mice and Men. In the 1970s and 1980s, Segal appeared frequently on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, nine times as a guest and once as a guest host. His appearances were marked by eccentric banter with Johnny Carson and were usually punctuated by bursts of banjo playing. In 1976, Segal co-hosted the Academy Awards.

Beginning in the 1980s, Segal began to appear in a number of television films and starred in a couple of short lived sitcoms, while also guest starring in shows such as Murder, She Wrote and The Larry Sanders Show.

From 1997 to 2003, however, Segal had his most prominent role in years when he starred in the NBC sitcom Just Shoot Me! as Jack Gallo, the owner and publisher of a New York City fashion magazine. He was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Musical or Comedy in 1999 and 2000 as well as a Satellite Award in 2002 for this part. The show lasted for seven seasons and 148 episodes.

More recently, Segal played Murray Berenson in three episodes of the television series Entourage (2009) and starred in the TV Land sitcom Retired at 35 (2011–2012).

Segal currently appears on the ABC sitcom The Goldbergs (2013–present), playing the eccentric but loveable grandfather of a semi-autobiographical family based on that of series creator Adam F. Goldberg. The series entered its second season in September 2014 and is currently in its fourth season.

In 2017, Segal received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in the category of Television.

Theatre

After college, Segal got a job as an understudy in a Broadway production of The Iceman Cometh. After serving in the United States Army, he appeared in Antony and Cleopatra for Joseph Papp and joined an improvisational group called The Premise, which performed at a Bleecker Street coffeehouse. Over the course of his career, Segal performed in several other Broadway plays. In 2001, he performed in Yasmina Reza's Art in his West End debut.

Music

Segal is an accomplished banjo player. At Haverford College and Columbia University, he formed Bruno Lynch and his Imperial Jazz Band. Segal also played with a dixieland jazz band while in college at Columbia that had several different names. When he was the one who booked a gig, he would bill the group as Bruno Lynch and his Imperial Jazzband. The group, which later settled on the name Red Onion Jazz Band, later played at his first wedding. In the Army, his band was called Corporal Bruno's Sad Sack Six.

In 1967, Segal released his debut LP, The Yama Yama Man. The title track is a ragtime version of the 1908 tune "The Yama Yama Man" with horns and banjos. Segal released the album at a time when he appeared regularly playing banjo on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

In 1974 he played in A Touch of Ragtime, an album with his band, the Imperial Jazzband (which, other than its name, may or may not have had any relation to his college band). During the 1970s and 1980s, Segal made frequent television appearances with the "Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band", whose members included actor Conrad Janis on trombone. In 1981, they performed live at Carnegie Hall. Recent engagements in Los Angeles have included guest spots with the award-winning residency Guitarology.

In addition to playing banjo while appearing on The Tonight Show, Segal has played the instrument in several of his acting roles, including several episodes of The Goldbergs.

In 2005, Segal played Dr. Dreck, a Jewish rapper, in the short film Chutzpah, This Is, although he did not perform his own raps. The group Chutzpah has released 2 albums since.

Personal life

Segal has been married three times. He married film editor Marion Segal Freed in 1956, and they were together for 26 years until their divorce in 1983. They had two daughters, Polly and Elizabeth. From 1983 until her death in 1996, he was married to Linda Rogoff, a one-time manager of The Pointer Sisters, whom he met at Carnegie Hall when he played the banjo with his band, the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band. He married his former George School boarding school classmate Sonia Schultz Greenbaum in 1996.

Film

Television

Other honors