- published: 12 Mar 2011
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George Segal (born February 13, 1934) is an American film, stage and television actor.
George Segal, Jr. was born to a Jewish family in 1934 Great Neck, Long Island, New York, the son of Fannie Blanche (née Bodkin) and George Segal, Sr. He was educated at George School, a private Quaker preparatory boarding school near Newtown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He also attended Haverford College. He graduated in 1955 from Columbia University.
Segal has played both drama and comedy, although he is more often seen in the latter. Originally a stage actor and musician, Segal appeared in several minor films in the early 1960s in addition to the well-known 1962 movie The Longest Day. He was signed to a Columbia Pictures contract in 1961, making his film debut in The Young Doctors and appearing in The Naked City produced for television by Columbia's Screen Gems.
He started attracting roles in 1965 as an egocentric painter in Ship of Fools, as a P.O.W. in King Rat in a role originally meant for Frank Sinatra, and as an Algerian paratrooper captured at Dien Bien Phu, who leaves the French army to become a leader of the FLN in Lost Command. He was loaned to Warner Bros for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (as Nick, for which he was nominated for an Oscar), later appearing as a British secret service agent in The Quiller Memorandum, a Cagneyesque gangster in The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, perplexed police detective Mo Brummel in No Way to Treat a Lady, a bookworm in The Owl and the Pussycat, a war-weary platoon commander in The Bridge at Remagen, a man laying waste to his marriage in Loving, and a hairdresser turned junkie in Born to Win. In 1967, Segal released his debut LP titled The Yama Yama Man; the title track is a ragtime version of "The Yama Yama Man" (1908) with horns and banjos. Segal apparently released the album due to his popularity playing banjo on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show".