George Segal looked like a man who knew he was in the wrong room and had decided to stay for the drinks. It made him a fine foil in 1960s drama, a lead in 1970s comedy, and good company on television after.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Nick in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) over the course of the night. He arrives as the younger guest with the good jaw and the better prospects, and for a long while he thinks his hosts are drunk and he is being patient with them. Segal lets it come to him a line at a time that they are not too drunk to aim, and that he is what they are aiming at. Nothing in his face announces it. He laughs a fraction later each time, and then he stops laughing.
That was his best work in a film, and it came early. He had started on stage after Columbia, made his film debut in The Young Doctors (1961), and by the middle of the decade was in the serious ensembles: Ship of Fools (1965), King Rat (1965), then the Nichols film, where he held his ground against Elizabeth Taylor without ever trying to take it from her. Ship of Fools shows the limit. As David, a painter quarrelling with Elizabeth Ashley about his work and her body, he is given scenes with the rhythm of a play and the insight of a magazine quiz, and he cannot do much with them. Stanley Kramer explains everyone twice, and Segal gets explained with the rest.
The 1970s made him a leading man, and a different one. In A Touch of Class (1973) opposite Glenda Jackson and California Split (1974) for Robert Altman, and in films for Ted Kotcheff and Carl Reiner and twice alongside Elliott Gould, he played men who were slightly too pleased with themselves and found the joke in it a beat before we did. He was urbane and jittery at once, and he made both likeable. It suited the decade. The leading parts thinned after the 1970s, and he spent much of his last twenty-five years on television, in Just Shoot Me (1997–2003) and The Goldbergs (2013–2021), where a man who is good at being mildly outmatched is precisely what a sitcom needs.
We felt for Nick more than we expected to, and were a little embarrassed by it, since he is a careerist who came to the house to get on and has earned some of what he gets. Segal plays the hurt rather than the outrage, and the hurt is what stays. Fifty years on he said of the film, "For me, there was a great satisfaction of being involved with it," which is about as much noise as he ever made about himself. Start there, then go to the comedies. He was never the biggest thing in the frame, and he seems to have known that was the job.
Biography
George Segal was an American actor and musician. He was born on 13 February 1934 in New York and died on 23 March 2021 in Santa Rosa, California.
Segal began his film career in the early 1960s. He appeared as David in Ship of Fools (1965) and in King Rat (1965). He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and won two Golden Globe Awards, including Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for A Touch of Class (1973). Other notable film roles include those in The Longest Day (1962), Where's Poppa? (1970), The Hot Rock (1972), Blume in Love (1973), California Split (1974) and Flirting with Disaster (1996).
On television, Segal played Jack Gallo in Just Shoot Me! (1997–2003) and Albert "Pops" Solomon in The Goldbergs (2013–2021). He was also a banjo player and released three albums.
