George Segal

The Premise's founding in 1960 placed it within the first wave of American improvisational theater companies that emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s following the influence of Second City's 1959 opening. Where Second City was based in Chicago, The Premise established itself in Greenwich Village, connecting the improvisational tradition to the New York intellectual and artistic community that centered on off-Broadway theater and the folk revival. Its 1,249 performances represented a sustained run that demonstrated the commercial and artistic viability of improvisational theater in New York at a historical moment when the form was still new to audiences outside of Chicago.

Segal's presence at The Premise as a founding member who subsequently moved into mainstream Hollywood film and television documented one of the early pathways through which improvisational performance training contributed to a major American film career. His Academy Award nomination for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and his sustained television work across the 1990s and 2010s established the Premise generation's place in the longer history of American entertainment, preceding by decades the more widely recognized Second City-to-Saturday Night Live-to-Hollywood pipeline.

The Premise operated at the intersection of the New York off-Broadway scene and the emerging improvisational theater tradition, occupying a position distinct from both the purely scripted theater of the Lincoln Center era and the Chicago improv tradition that would eventually dominate American comedy. Its Greenwich Village location during the early 1960s placed it within a cultural moment when folk music, political comedy, and avant-garde theater were developing in proximity at venues throughout the neighborhood, and its improvisational format connected the company to the spontaneous, socially engaged performance sensibilities characteristic of that cultural environment.

George Segal's founding membership in The Premise connects him to the earliest institutional moment of improvisational theater in New York, at a point when the form's viability as a commercial and artistic proposition was still being established. His subsequent six-decade film and television career, including the Academy Award nomination and two prominent long-running television roles, demonstrates the range of trajectories available to performers who came out of the early improvisational theater community.

His work as a musician, including the banjo performances and recordings with the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band, reflected a broadly collaborative and improvisational sensibility that extended beyond his theatrical career. As a performer who bridged the serious Method-acting tradition and the emerging improvisational theater community of the early 1960s, Segal exemplifies the cross-training environment in which the first generation of American improv theater performers developed. His career arc from The Premise's Bleecker Street stage through five decades of Hollywood character work documents one of the earliest and most sustained examples of an improvisational theater background supporting a mainstream American entertainment career of the first order.

George Segal was born on February 13, 1934, in New York City, the son of a businessman in the arts supply industry. He grew up in the New York area and earned a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia College in 1955. After a period of service in the United States Army, he trained as an actor at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg and at HB Studio under Uta Hagen, receiving a comprehensive grounding in the Method and allied acting approaches that characterized serious theatrical training in New York in the late 1950s.

George Segal was born on February 13, 1934, in New York City. He was married three times: to actress Marion Sokoloff (1956-1983), to Patricia Carver (1983-1996), and to Sonia Schultz Greenbaum (2005 until his death). He died on March 23, 2021, in Santa Rosa, California, at the age of eighty-seven, from complications of bypass surgery.