George Segal
George Segal is an actor, born 1934.
1965 gave George Segal two prestige pictures in one year, Ship of Fools and King Rat, and 1966 gave him Nick in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which is still the performance his reputation rests on. He spent the rest of the decade proving he could hold a serious frame: The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, No Way to Treat a Lady, The Bridge at Remagen.
Then he found the thing he was actually best at. Segal was the great screen portrait of the American man losing his composure. Where's Poppa?, The Hot Rock, A Touch of Class, California Split, Fun with Dick and Jane: in all of them he is a reasonable person watching his own life go wrong at speed, and he plays the fraying rather than the disaster. He won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a musical or comedy for that mode.
The 1980s were leaner. The comeback came sideways, through Look Who's Talking in 1989 and the 1993 follow-up, then a genuinely funny turn as Ed Coplin in Flirting with Disaster and small parts in The Mirror Has Two Faces and The Cable Guy.
The last act was television, and it suited him. Jack Gallo on Just Shoot Me! from 1997, then Pops Solomon on The Goldbergs from 2013. He died in 2021, having worked from the 1960s to the end without ever quite becoming a movie star, which is not the same thing as not being very good.
Movies (38)
- 2012 (2009)
- Love & Other Drugs (2010)
- The Cable Guy (1996)
- The Babysitter (1995)
- Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
- Joshua Tree (1993)
- The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996)
- Look Who's Talking (1989)
- Look Who's Talking Now! (1993)
- For the Boys (1991)
- The Bridge at Remagen (1969)
- Heights (2005)
- Elsa & Fred (2014)
- King Rat (1965)
- The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1967)
- Ship of Fools (1965)
- Lost Command (1966)
- The Hot Rock (1972)
- Carbon Copy (1981)
- Heroes and Demons (2012)
- Born to Win (1971)
- Invitation to a Gunfighter (1964)
- Rollercoaster (1977)
- Dinotopia: Quest for the Ruby Sunstone (2005)
- Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978)
- California Split (1974)
- Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind (2020)
- Fun with Dick and Jane (1977)
- Made for Each Other (2009)
- Flirting with Disaster (1996)
TV (14)
- The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962)
- The Mike Douglas Show (1961)
- The Goldbergs (2013)
- Just Shoot Me! (1997)
- Aaahh!!! Real Monsters (1994)
- The Naked Truth (1995)
- The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest (1996)
- Burke's Law (1994)
- The Zeta Project (2001)
- Tracey Takes On... (1996)
- Channing (1963)
- The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1967)
- High Tide (1994)
- The Nurses (1962)
Where to start with George Segal
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is the reputation and it earns it, but do not start there, because it will give you the wrong idea about what he was for.
Begin instead with California Split, where the loose, overlapping style fits him perfectly and he does the anxious-gambler register better than anyone. Then A Touch of Class for the award-winning comic version, and The Hot Rock for the caper timing.
Where’s Poppa? is the strangest thing in the filmography by a distance, a black comedy aggressive enough that it still startles, and worth seeing precisely because it is uncomfortable. King Rat is the best of the early dramatic work.
For the late career, Flirting with Disaster is the sharpest, and The Goldbergs and Just Shoot Me! are where a whole generation met him first, entirely unaware of the 1970s run behind it.