George Segal, actor of roguish charm and wide dramatic range, dies at 87

The cause was complications from heart bypass surgery, said his daughter Elizabeth Segal.

After an early stage career, including Shakespearean tragedies, Mr. Segal went to Hollywood and proved highly adaptable in comedy and drama. His film breakthrough was “King Rat” (1965), based on the James Clavell novel, in which he played a scheming prisoner of war who trades on the black market.

The next year, he received glowing reviews for a televised production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” in which he played Biff, the son of Lee J. Cobb’s title character. Mr. Segal appeared soon after in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966), playing a young college professor in a filmed version of the emotionally fraught Broadway play by Edward Albee.

Mike Nichols directed a cast that included Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor as George and Martha, a middle-aged couple in a college town, bitterly feuding with each other and their failed dreams.

Mr. Segal, as a young college professor, and Sandy Dennis as his mousy wife, join George and Martha for drinks after a party and get caught up in their maelstrom.

“Segal demonstrates a talent that until now, on the screen, at any rate, was only latent,” critic James Powers wrote in a review for the Hollywood Reporter. “Segal must be glib, assured, and then be snapped and broken, and retain some of his cockiness (in one meaning or another), but be different.”

All four principal cast members received Academy Award nominations, including Mr. Segal for best supporting actor. Taylor won an Oscar as best actress and Dennis won for best supporting actress.

“Virginia Woolf” showed how Mr. Segal was a skilled ensemble player, enlivening the screen with an easygoing affability, even when playing cads and crooks. Handsome but approachable, Mr. Segal brought a modern urbanity to his roles, representing a change from the studio-polished personas of an older generation of Hollywood actors.

Refusing to change his name or have a nose job, he often played put-upon Jewish characters who viewed the world through a wry, almost neurotic sensibility. In “No Way to Treat a Lady” (1968), he played a detective on the hunt for a serial killer, while coping with an overbearing mother.

Mr. Segal portrayed a similar character in Carl Reiner’s 1970 comedy, “Where’s Poppa?,” in which he engages in preposterous efforts to knock off his aging, senile mother, played by Ruth Gordon. In one scene, he dresses in a gorilla suit, hoping to induce a heart attack.

“You almost scared me to death,” Gordon calls out.

“Almost is not good enough,” he says.

By the early 1970s, Mr. Segal seemed to be poised for stardom but never had a commercial smash. Nevertheless, he kept up a hectic pace of more than two dozen films between 1966 and 1980. He paired with Robert Redford as less-than-competent jewel thieves in “The Hot Rock” (1972), then appeared two years later with Elliott Gould in director Robert Altman’s “California Split,” about compulsive gamblers scraping bottom.

In 1971, Mr. Segal played a sympathetic drug addict in the black comedy “Born to Win,” which also featured Robert De Niro in one of his first film roles.

“Segal is one of the most interesting young American actors, and he isn’t shy about accepting projects that sound weird, if not impossible,” critic Roger Ebert wrote of the film, which had poor distribution and is largely forgotten. “Segal is a virtuoso at making his character funny and sad, laughing and laughed at, brave and pathetic.”

It was during the 1970s that Mr. Segal became known as a leading man in romantic comedies such as “The Owl and the Pussycat” (1970), with Barbra Streisand; “Blume in Love” (1973), in which he played a divorce lawyer trying with disturbing aggression to win back his ex-wife; and “A Touch of Class,” where he was a married American executive in London seeking to have a clandestine affair with a Londoner, played by Glenda Jackson, who won an Oscar for best actress.

Mr. Segal’s other credits during those years included a science-fiction thriller, “Terminal Man” (1974), as well as “Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?” (1978) with Jacqueline Bisset and “Fun With Dick and Jane” (1977), a romantic caper film in which he and Jane Fonda played an overextended suburban couple who turn to crime. (When they hold up the telephone company, the other customers start cheering.)

After making “The Last Married Couple in America” with Natalie Wood in 1980, Mr. Segal’s career began to fall off.

“I was guilty of spoiled behavior,” he told the Chicago Tribune years later. “I think it’s impossible when that star rush comes, not to get a little full of yourself, which is what I was.”

He turned increasingly toward television work and character roles. He starred in two short-lived series in the 1980s, “Take Five” and “Murphy’s Law,” before being cast in NBC’s “Just Shoot Me!” in 1997. He played the oft-married publisher of a fashion magazine whose daughter (played by Laura San Giacomo) reluctantly came to work for him. The sitcom, which also starred Wendie Malick and David Spade, ran for seven seasons and won Mr. Segal a new generation of fans.

Since 2013, Mr. Segal had been in ABC’s “The Goldbergs,” as a lovable, eccentric grandfather, Albert “Pops” Solomon, in the family sitcom set in the 1980s. The final episode in which Mr. Segal appeared is scheduled to air on April 7.

George Segal Jr. was born Feb. 13, 1934, in New York City and grew up in Great Neck, N.Y. His father sold hops and malt to brewers; his mother was a homemaker.

Mr. Segal was giving magic presentations when he was 8 and decided after seeing Alan Ladd as a hit man in the movie “This Gun for Hire” (1942) that he wanted to be an actor. He appeared in plays while attending a Quaker high school in Pennsylvania. After two years at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, he graduated from Columbia University in 1955.

He was also a singer and musician, playing banjo in a college jazz band and in another group while serving in the Army. He often brought his banjo to his frequent guest appearances on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.”

He studied acting with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio workshop in New York and, in the early 1960s, helped found a comedy improv troupe, the Premise, which included writer and actor Buck Henry, who became a lifelong friend. He considered his experience with the improv group far more beneficial than his earlier studies of method acting.

“I learned more about real motivation and how to improvise than I could have anywhere else,” he told Newsweek in 1970.

His first marriage, to Marion Sobol, ended in divorce. His second wife, Linda Rogoff, died in 1996. Later that year he married his high school sweetheart, Sonia Schultz Greenbaum. In addition to his wife, survivors include two daughters from his first marriage, Elizabeth Segal and Polly Segal.

“I don’t ever know how it happens,” Mr. Segal said in 2013, musing on success in Hollywood. “Sometimes it’s being in the right place at the right time, sometimes you’re just the guy they want. It’s impossible to explain. This is a real gambler’s business, acting. It’s a crapshoot.”