George Segal (born February 13, 1934 in Great Neck, Long Island, New York) is an American film and stage actor. He was educated at George School, a private Quaker preparatory boarding school near Newtown, Pennsylvania.

A 1955 graduate of Columbia University, he 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 before attracting critical attention in 1965 as a distraught newlywed in Ship of Fools and as a P.O.W. in King Rat. He followed with well-regarded performances as Nick in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (for which he was nominated for an Oscar), 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 man laying waste to his marriage in Loving, and a hairdresser turned junkie in Born to Win. Segal also starred with Ruth Gordon in Carl Reiner's 1970 dark comedy Where's Poppa?.

He played an inept burglar in the 1972 comedy The Hot Rock with Robert Redford, a comically unfaithful husband in A Touch of Class and a midlife crisis victim in Blume in Love. He co-starred with Jane Fonda as suburbanites-turned-bank-robbers in Fun with Dick and Jane, and starred as a faux gourmet in Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?.

Segal was so appealing that too often he was asked to carry a film on his charm alone , especially in the 1970s. He was relatively inactive in the 1980s, but bounced back as the sleazy father of Kirstie Alley's baby in Look Who's Talking, and in the 1993 sequel Look Who's Talking Now, and as a left-wing comedy writer in For the Boys (1991).

He has since starred in the long-running NBC television sitcom Just Shoot Me! (1997-2003) as the head of the fashion and style magazine Blush.

He is also a banjo player; in 1974 he played in "A Touch of Ragtime" , an album with his band, the Imperial Jazzband.

George Segal (November 26, 1924 , New York - June 9 2000, New Brunswick, New Jersey) was an American painter and sculptor associated with the Pop Art movement. He was presented with a National Medal of Arts in 1999.

Although Segal started his art career as a painter, his best known works are cast lifesize figures and the tableaux the figures inhabited. In place of traditional casting techniques, Segal pioneered the use of plaster bandages (plaster-impregnated gauze strips designed for making orthopedic casts) as a sculptural medium. In this process, he first wrapped a model with bandages in sections, then removed the hardened forms and put them back together with more plaster to form a hollow shell. These forms were not used as molds; the shell itself became the final sculpture, including the rough texture of the bandages. Initially, Segal kept the sculptures stark white, but a few years later he began painting them (usually in bright monochrome). Eventually he started having the final forms cast in bronze, sometimes patinated white to resemble the original plaster.

Segal's figures had minimal color and detail, which gave them a ghostly, melancholic appearance. In larger works, one or more figures were placed in anonymous, typically urban environments such as a street corner, bus, or diner. In contrast to the figures, the environments were built using found objects.

From the 1950s until his death Segal lived on a chicken farm in South Brunswick Township, New Jersey. He only ran the chicken farm for a few years, but he used the space to hold annual picnics for his friends from the New York art world. His location in central New Jersey also led to friendships with professors from the Rutgers University art department. Segal introduced several Rutgers professors to John Cage, and took part in Cage's legendary experimental composition classes. Allan Kaprow coined the term Happening to describe the art performances that took place on Segal's farm in the Spring of 1957. Events for Yam Fest also took place there. Segal was married to Helen Segal from 1946 until his death in 2000...

At one time in the early 1970s, it seemed like George Segal would have a career like that enjoyed by his contemporary Jack Nicholson, that of an actor's actor equally adept at comedy and drama. Segal never made the leap to superstar status, and surprisingly, has never won a major acting award, the latter phenomenon being particularly surprising when viewed from the period 1973-4, when he reached the height of his career, appearing in Touch of Class, A (1973) and Robert Altman (I)'s California Split (1974). It was at this point that Segal's career went awry, when he priced himself as a superstar with a seven-figure salary, but failed to come through at the box office. Black Bird, The (1975) was a failure, but "Lucky Lady" was a disaster. Ironically, at the end of the decade, he dropped out of a movie that would have burnished his tarnished lustre as a star: Blake Edwards' 10 (1979). 10 (1979) made Dudley Moore a star, while Arthur (1981) made him a superstar in the 1980s, a lost decade for Segal. It was an example of a career burnout usually associated with the "Oscar curse" (his No Way to Treat a Lady (1968) co-star Rod Steiger, for example, was a great character actor whose career was run off the rails by the expectations raised by the Academy Award). George Segal has never won an Oscar, but more surprisingly, has only been nominated once, for Best Supporting Actor of 1966 for his role as "Nick" in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). George Segal was born on February 13, 1934 in Great Neck, Long Island, New York. After a stint in the military, he made his bones as a stage actor before being cast in his first meaty film role in Young Doctors, The (1961). His turns in Ship of Fools (1965) and the eponymous King Rat (1965) in 1965 heralded the arrival of a major talent. He followed it up with his Oscar-nominated performance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), in which he more than held his own against Richard Burton (I) and Elizabeth Taylor (I). Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) was a cultural phenomenon, the film that wrecked the MPDDA censorship code that had been in place since 1934, and a huge box office success to boot. He had arrived in the major leagues. By the early 1970s, appearances in such films as Owl and the Pussycat, The (1970), Blume in Love (1973), Born to Win (1971) and Hot Rock, The (1972) had made him a major star with an enviable reputation, just under the heights of the superstar status enjoyed by the likes of Paul Newman (I). He followed up Touch of Class, A (1973) (a hit film for which his co-star Glenda Jackson won an Oscar) and his brilliant performance as the out-of-control gambler in California Split (1974) with a co-starring turn opposite of Jane Fonda in Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), a big hit that revitalized Jane Fonda's film carer. He gave a deft comic performance in Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978) with Jacqueline Bisset and Robert Morley (I), which proved a modest box office success. For all practical purposes, even after the failures of Black Bird, The (1975), "Lucky Lady" and Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox, The (1976), it seemed like Segal, with a few deft career choices, could reorient his career and deliver on the promise of his early period. That he didn't may be the unintended consequence of his focusing on comedy to the detriment of drama. The comedy Touch of Class, A (1973) made him a million dollar-per-film movie star, and that's what he concentrated on. Segal began relying on his considerable charm to pull off movies that had little going for them other than their star, and it backfired on him. These films weren't infused with the outrageously funny, subversive comedy of Where's Poppa? (1970), a success from his first period that he enjoyed along with co-star Ruth Gordon (I) and director Carl Reiner. When Segal first made it in the mid-1960s, he established his serious actor bona fides with a deal he cut with ABC-TV that featured him in TV adaptations of Broadway plays. He also played a very memorable "Biff Loman" in Death of a Salesman (1966) (TV), shining in performance in counterpoint to the vital presence that was Lee J. Cobb's "Willy Loman". It was a good life for an actor, and he took time to show off his banjo-playing skills by fronting the "Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band", with which he cut several records. While the 1980s were mostly a career wasteland for Segal, he came back in the 1990s, using his flair for comedy as part of the ensemble cast of "Just Shoot Me!" (1997).