This week, we lost George Segal, a major Hollywood star circa mid-1960s through the 1970s, and like Jack Lemmon and our era’s Michael Cera, he had that special knack for making neurosis funny yet sympathetic. He took dramatic and comedic roles. Some of his most acclaimed film roles include Ship Of Fools (1965), 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).

In King Rat (1965) Segal plays a smarty-pants American among stiff-upper-lip British soldiers and officers in a POW camp surviving by duping his fellow prisoners and double-crossing camp officers.

In 1966, he received an Academy Award nomination for his performance in Mike Nichols‘ brave adaptation of Edward Albee‘s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor gave career-best performances as a weary middle-aged academic and his wife who vent their long-simmering frustrations on two hapless guests, a young Biology teacher and his nervous wife. Segal and the great Sandy Dennis in those roles managed to not be upstaged by the histrionics of the celebrated stars. No easy feat.

Also, in 1966, Segal played Biff Loman in a live television production of Arthur Miller‘s Death Of A Salesman, opposite Lee J. Cobb (the original Willy Loman), and he starred in an intriguing espionage thriller about neo-Nazis in contemporary Germany, The Quiller Memorandum. This film is particularly provocative because Segal’s cheeky, edging acting style is in opposition with the dry, understated work of his co-star, Alec Guinness.

Also for television, in 1968, he portrays George opposite Nicol Williamson as Lennie in a production of John Steinbeck‘s Of Mice And Men, which made a profound impression on me as a 14-years-old actor wannabe.

He is in top form in Sidney Lumet‘s smart-alecky Bye Bye Braverman (1968) a comedy about a group of Upper Westside Jewish intellectuals who meet at the funeral of an old friend. Afterward, Segal’s trademark was urbane neuroticism. You can see it in his next two films in which he plays Jewish sons: No Way To Treat A Lady (1968), as a detective whose girlfriend (Lee Remick) must deal with the disapproval from his mother, played by Eileen Heckart.

He was one of the first American film actors to rise to leading man status without changing his Jewish surname, helping pave the way for other Jewish actors of his generation.

My two favorite Segal performances are in Carl Reiner‘s Where’s Poppa? (1970), where Segal tries to give his mother (Ruth Gordon) a heart attack by dressing in a gorilla suit and jumping on to her bed. She screams: ”You almost scared me to death!” His reply: ”Almost is not good enough.” In The Owl And The Pussycat (also 1970), a charmingly raunchy farce written by his pal Buck Henry, Segal plays a reserved writer with Barbra Streisand as a loquacious part-time prostitute. This pair of movies meant everything to me in high school. My best friend Rich and I took to repeating dialogue from both of them and made it part of our lexicon. Both films remain cult classics.

There is also his combustible comic chemistry with Glenda Jackson in the engaging A Touch Of Class (1973), just the sort of witty war-of-the-sexes adventure that was popular in the 1970s, and which Segal did best.

In the 1970s, Segal was on a roll with Paul Mazursky‘s smart, satirical Blume In Love and Robert Altman‘s California Split, a comic look at compulsive gambling. He had already proved that he had the emotional weight for drama, but Segal still went of light comedy like Fun With Dick And Jane (1977) with Jane Fonda and Segal as a pair of yuppie bank robbers.

Segal continued to work regularly throughout the next four decades, even after his star wattage had burned out. In 1979, he gave up on working in films after he walked off the set on the first day of shooting Blake Edwards‘ 10, after complaining about the amount of control he felt his co-star, Julie Andrews, wife of the director, had over the film. Orion Pictures filed a lawsuit and Segal counter-sued. With the crew and cast standing by, Edwards called Dudley Moore to take over the male lead, and the film was made and became a huge hit.

Segal was born in New York City and grew up in Great Neck, Long Island. Although his family was Jewish, he went to a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania. An accomplished banjo player, Segal played in a Dixieland band while attending Columbia University to study Theatre. After graduation, he joined the Off-Broadway theatre company Circle in the Square.

In 1956, following three years in the U.S. Army, Segal returned to New York City. He studied at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg. His first big break was in The Premise, a long-running revue presented in a Bleecker Street basement, where he initially appeared alongside Tom Aldredge, Joan Darling, Buck Henry, Gene Hackman, and George Furth. Three years later, show transferred to London’s West End.

His film debut was in the entertaining hospital soap opera The Young Doctors (1961), playing a rather bland intern. In The New Interns (1964), he attracted attention portraying a sour-faced ex-con physician. That same year he played a bitter civil war veteran hunted by a contract killer, Yul Brynner, in Invitation To A Gunfighter. Segal held his own in the starry cast (including Vivien Leigh in her final film role, Simone Signoret, José Ferrer and Lee Marvin) in Stanley Kramer‘s Ship Of Fools (1965), and then swiftly moved into the most successful period of his career.

In the 1980s and 1990s, his film roles sort of dried up, but Segal found work doing television. I remember a 1994 episode of The Larry Sanders Show, where Larry (Garry Shandling), a talk show host, tries to stay awake while Segal goes down a list of all the films he worked in recently that had trouble getting released. Afterwards, Larry is heard backstage telling everyone that he has got to start getting some fresh new guests.

In the 1990s, Segal specialized in good supporting roles in films, mostly playing fathers, such as Ben Stiller‘s neurotic father in David O. Russell‘s dark comedy, Flirting With Disaster (1996), where he is perfectly paired with Mary Tyler Moore.

Segal looked sharp and played with comic flair, a fashion magazine owner in a sitcom Just Shoot Me! (1997-2003), and he enjoyed another long-running role on television in The Goldbergs (2017-). He starred on Broadway in Art in 1999 and he played the role again in London in 2001.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Segal was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and occasionally he appeared as a guest host. I loved his eccentric banter with Carson and his sudden bursts of banjo playing. In 1974, Segal’s band, The Imperial Jazz Band, released an album called A Touch Of Ragtime, with Segal on banjo. In 1981, he performed live at Carnegie Hall with the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band, which he formed.

Segal was taken by complications from bypass surgery. He was 87 years old when he left us.