The Ultimate Trouper Has Died at 87: George Segal, the 1970s’ Movie Star Who in His Dotage Became a TV Star, Never Retired

 

George Segal and Lee Remick, in No Way to Treat a Lady  

By Nicholas Stix

imdb.com, with its peculiar counting system, says that George Segal had 126 acting credits, but I just counted 530 acting credits, and 696 overall credits.

I first saw Segal play a Jewish NYPD detective on the track of a serial killer, who would always put on lipstick and kiss his elderly, female victims on the forehead, after strangling them.

The 1968 picture, a thriller with a sense of humor, was called No Way to Treat a Lady, a line we hear from Segal’s aging mother, when she hears of what the killer did to an old lady.

The serial killer, played by Rod Steiger (who had just won his Oscar as Best Actor for In the Heat of the Night), is committing revenge against his dead mother, an acclaimed actress, and showing her that he was the better actor. He still lives in the theater she had owned and starred in, and uses the makeup, wigs, and costumes from his mother’s days, to commit his murders, e.g., as an Irish priest, replete with a broad brogue. (Steiger finally sat down with a dialect coach!)

The beautiful Lee Remick played Segal’s shiksa girlfriend, whom the killer also targets, once the newspapers publicize the identity of the detective heading up the investigation.

A friend thinks William Goldman, who wrote the novel the movie was based on, got the idea for the child who resents his overbearing theater mother from Gypsy.

Those were Segal’s salad days, from the mid-1960s-the late 1970s, when he went from hit to hit. However, according to Jon Hopkinson at imdb.com, Segal began demanding superstar money but couldn’t deliver superstar box office. But after a rough patch in the 1980s, as he got older, he segued successfully to TV.

 

By Grand Rapids Anonymous

Wednesday, March 24, 2021 at 12:35:00 A.M. EDT

Another Fine White Actor of Yesteryear Passes—George Segal Dies at 87 from Complications of Bypass Surgery

LOS ANGELES (AP) — George Segal, the banjo player turned actor who was nominated for an Oscar for 1966’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and worked into his late 80s on the ABC sitcom “The Goldbergs,” died Tuesday in Santa Rosa, California, his wife said.

“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. He was 87.

George Segal was always best known as a comic actor, becoming one of the screen’s biggest stars in the 1970s when lighthearted adult comedies thrived.

But his most famous role was in a harrowing drama, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, based on Edward Albee’s acclaimed play.

He was the last surviving credited member of the tiny cast, all four of whom were nominated for Academy Awards: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton for starring roles, Sandy Dennis and Segal for supporting performances. The women won Oscars, the men did not.

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” since 2013.

“Today we lost a legend. It was a true honor being a small part of George Segal’s amazing legacy,” said “Goldbergs” creator Adam Goldberg, who based the show on his 1980s childhood. “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.”

In his Hollywood prime, he played a stuffy intellectual opposite Barbra Streisand’s freewheeling prostitute in 1970’s “The Owl and the Pussycat”; a cheating husband opposite Glenda Jackson in 1973’s “A Touch of Class”; a hopeless gambler opposite Elliot Gould in director Robert Altman’s 1974 “California Split”; and a bank-robbing suburbanite opposite Jane Fonda in 1977’s “Fun with Dick and Jane.”

--GRA