George Segal was an American actor and musician. He became popular in the 1960s and 1970s for playing both dramatic and comedic roles.
Some of his most acclaimed roles are in films such as Ship of Fools (1965), King Rat (1965), who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? (1966), The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967), Where’s Poppa? (1970), The Hot Rock (1972), Blume in love (1973), A Touch of Class (1973), California Split (1974), For the Boys (1991), and Flirting with Disaster (1996).
He was nominated for the Academy Award for the Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and won two Golden Globe Award, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture or Comedy for his performance in A Touch of Class.
On television, he is best known for his roles as Jack Gallo on Just Shoot Me! (1997–2003) and as Albert “Pops” Solomon on The Goldbergs (2013–2021).
Segal was also an accomplished banjo player. He released three albums and performed with the instrument in several of his acting roles and on late-night television.
Early Life.
George Segal Jr. was born in New York City, the youngest of four children born to Fannie Blanche Segal and George Segal Sr., a malt and hop agent. He spent much of his childhood in Great Neck, New York. His oldest brother, John, worked in the hops brokerage business and was an innovator in the cultivation of new hop varieties; the middle brother, Fred, was a screenwriter; and his sister Greta died of pneumonia before he 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.
Segal first became interested in acting at the age of nine, when he saw Alan Ladd in This Gun For Hire. He also started playing the banjo at a young age, later stating: “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 Pennsylvania in 1951 and attended Haverford College. He then graduated from Columbia College of Columbia University in 1955 with a Bachelor of Arts in performing arts and drama. He played banjo at Haverford and also at Columbia, where he played with a dixieland jazz band that had several different names. When he booked a gig, he would bill the group as Bruno Lynch and his Imperial Jazz Band. The group, which later settled on the name Red Onion Jazz Band, played at Segal’s first wedding.
Segal served in the US Army. While there, he also played in a band, which was called Corporal Bruno’s Sad Sack Six.
Career.
After college and the army, Segal eventually studied at the Actor Studio with Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen and got a job as an understudy in a Broadway production of The Iceman Cometh. He appeared in Antony and Cleopatra for Joseph Papp and joined an improvisational group called The Premise, which performed at a Bleecker Street coffeehouse and whose ranks included Buck Henry and Theodore Flicker. Segal continued to perform on Broadway with roles in Gideon (1961–62), which ran for 236 performances, as well as Rattle of a Simple Man (1963), an adaptation of a British hit.
He was signed to a Columbia contract in 1961, making his film debut in The Young Doctors. Segal made several television appearances in the early 1960s, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Armstrong Circle Theatre, and Naked City, and appeared in the well-known World War II film The Longest Day (1962). He also had a small role in Act One (1963) and a more prominent part in the western Invitation to a Gunfighter (1964).
Segal came West to Hollywood from New York City to star in a TV series with Robert Taylor that never aired. Nonetheless, he joined the cast of Columbia Pictures’ medical drama The New Interns (1964), and the studio then put him under long-term contract.
Segal had another success when he starred in the ABC sitcom The Goldbergs (2013–present), playing Albert “Pops” Solomon, the eccentric but lovable grandfather of a semi-autobiographical family based on that of series creator Adam. F. Goldberg. The long-running series entered its eighth season in 2021, and Segal was part of the regular cast up until his death in March of that year. Throughout the show, Segal had appeared in most, though not all, episodes and, as in some of his earlier roles, he played the banjo several times on the show.
In 2017, Segal received a star on
Personal Life.
Segal was 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 have two daughters. 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.
Segal died of complications from bypass surgery in Santa Ros, on March 23, 2021, at age 87.
Net worth.
George Segal has a net worth of $10 million dollars.
