Erich Segal, a classics professor turned popular writer died from complications of a heart attack. He also suffered with Parkinson's Disease which he had been wrestling with for over 25 years. Segal is best known for his novel “Love Story” which became a huge commercial success if not quite a critical one when it appeared in 1970.

He is best remembered to us Beatle fans as one of four screenplay writers for the "Yellow Submarine" movie.

Published by Harper & Row, “Love Story” was the novelization of a yet-to-be-produced screenplay by Mr. Segal. It chronicled the fate of star-crossed lovers, the highborn Oliver Barrett IV and the working-class Jennifer Cavilleri, who meet at college, fall in love and, over the strenuous objections of Oliver’s family, get married. Just as we, the audiance, are getting into these two young, beautiful lovers; she dies of a drawn out cancer case, he cries and the story ends. Predictable but effective at the time.

Released to great fanfare on the book’s coattails, the movie, starring Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neal, appeared at the end of 1970. In a 2000 article, Variety called it “the first of the modern-day blockbusters,” writing that it had grossed nearly $200 million and saved its studio, Paramount Pictures, “which was facing imminent destruction.”  “Love Story” received seven Academy Award nominations, including one for Segal’s screenplay; it won the Oscar for best original score.

Erich Wolf Segal was born in Brooklyn on June 16, 1937, the son of Samuel Segal, a rabbi, and the former Cynthia Shapiro. After graduating from Midwood High School, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, where he had the distinction of being both class poet and class Latin orator. He went on to earn master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard.  From the 1960s to the 1980s, Mr. Segal taught classics at Yale. He continued to work as a classicist long after he became a successful novelist, holding visiting professorships at Princeton, Oxford, the University of London.

Mr. Segal first envisioned “Love Story” as a film. According to many published accounts, his screenplay was rejected by several studios as too sentimental for the time. Paramount urged him to release it as a novel first.  The novel’s prose style ran the gamut from fairly enlightened (“That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.”) to comic cliche' (“ ‘Jenny, for Christ’s sake, how can I read John Stuart Mill when every single second I’m dying to make love to you?’ ”) *Oh, the pain, the horror.

Fans loved both "Yellow Submarine" and "Love Story."  Critics were less than enthusiastic with "Love Story" citing the banal cliche's being thrown around and fobbed off as literate dialogue. Nevertheless, Segal took it all in stride and continued teaching and writing.  Segal is survived by his wife, the former Karen James; two daughters, Francesca Segal and Miranda Segal, his mother, and two brothers.


By John Haberstroh   (Bassist for BeatleTracks)   Find us at www.beatletracksband.com