Playwright and character actor George Furth died 11 August 2008. Born George Schweinfurth in Chicago, Illinois, on 14 December 1932, he graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in speech. He made his Broadway stage debut in 1961, and his film debut came in 1964 in The Best Man.
He appeared in nearly 100 film and television roles, including memorable roles in Doctor Detroit (1983), The Cannonball Run (1981), Blazing Saddles (1974) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). His genre credits include: The Man with Two Brains (1983), Megaforce (1982), Salvage 1 (1979), Oh, God! (1977), Sleeper (1973), Rod Serling’s Night Gallery (1970), I Dream of Jeannie (1969), and Batman (1966).
As a playwright, Furth was best known for his collaborations with Stephen Sondheim. Together they wrote three shows, two musicals (Company and Merrily We Roll Along) and one nonmusical mystery (Getting Away With Murder). Merrily and Murder are famous failures (Merrily closed after 16 performances in 1981). Company, however, was a hit, winning the Tony for best musical in 1971, and garnering Furth a Tony for the book.
Actor/director Warren Beatty, with whom Furth worked on Shampoo and Bulworth, told the New York Times “Nobody had a larger group of completely devoted friends than George. His intelligence was of inestimable value to me in the work I’ve done.”
Furth leaves no immediate survivors.