George Segal

He is also an accomplished banjo player. After being nominated several times before, in 2002 Denzel won an Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in the film Training Day in which he played a corrupt, drug-dealing cop. He has since starred in the long-running television comedy series Just Shoot Me as the head of the wacky fashion and style magazine "Blush". He turned down several similar roles, such as the chance to play Martin Luther King Jr., because he didn't want to risk being typecast by subject matter. 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 the left-wing comedy writer in For the Boys (1991). Malcolm X transformed Denzel's career, turning him overnight into one of Hollywood's most respected actors. Segal was so appealing that too often he was asked to carry a film on his charm alone, especially in the 1970s. Denzel played one of his most critically acclaimed roles in 1992's Malcolm X, directed by Spike Lee where his performance as the Black Nationalist leader earned him an Oscar nomination.

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 suburbanite-turned-bank-robbers in Fun With Dick and Jane, and starred as a faux gourmet in Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?. In 1989 Denzel won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, after playing a defiant self-possessed slave in the film Glory. Valentine's Day Massacre, a perplexed police detective Mo Brummel in No Way to Treat a Lady, a bookworm in The Owl and the Pussycat, and in a pair of impressive dramatic performances, a man laying waste to his marriage in Loving and a hairdresser turned junkie in Born to Win. In 1987 he starred as South African anti-apartheid campaigner Steve Biko in Richard Attenborough's Cry Freedom. He followed with top performances as Nick in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (for which he was Oscar-nominated), a Cagneyesque gangster in The St. Washington turned down roles in several action films, in hopes for a more challenging role. in King Rat. Elsewhere.

The amiable, wavy-haired leading man is equally at home in drama and comedy, although he is more often seen in the latter. Originally a stage actor and musician, Segal appeared in several nondescript films in the early 1960s before raising eyebrows in 1965 as a distraught newlywed in Ship of Fools and as a P.O.W. His big break came when he starred in the popular TV hospital drama St. George Segal (born February 13, 1934) is a well-known American film and stage actor who was born in Great Neck, Long Island, New York. While filming this movie he met actress Pauletta Pearson, who he later married. He landed his first film role in the 1975 TV movie Wilma. His mother's reaction was to send him away to preparatory school, and then on to Fordham University, where he discovered acting and earned a degree in journalism.