Died: March 23, 2021.
GEORGE Segal, who has died aged 87, was an actor who rode a wave of grown-up comedies during the 1970s, when Hollywood was exploring some of the new freedoms that had opened up the decade before.
Segal evoked the amorous ambitions of assorted hapless roués at odds with their lot. He did this with an understated twinkly-eyed dryness as he sparred gently with a role-call of actresses who similarly defined their era.
He starred with Barbra Streisand in The Owl and the Pussycat (1970); played a suburban bank robber alongside Jane Fonda in Fun with Dick and Jane (1977); and – magnificently – played opposite Glenda Jackson in A Touch of Class (1973). Out of this came a kind of post me-generation focus on romantic shenanigans that took screwball comedy into more intimate areas.