'Love Story' columnist Erich Segal dies age-old 72

LONDON – Erich Segal, the Ivy League assistant who accomplished boilerplate acclaim and fabricated millions sob as biographer of the atypical and cine "Love Story," has died of a affection attack, his babe said Tuesday. He was 72.

Francesca Segal said her ancestor died Sunday at his home in London. She said he had suffered from Parkinson's ache _a acoustic action that affects movement — for 25 years. His burial was captivated in London on Tuesday, she said.

Segal was a Yale abstract assistant and cine biographer back he angry a proposed cine about two academy acceptance — preppy Oliver and smart-mouthed Jenny — into a novel. Appear in 1970, "Love Story" was a weeper about a adolescent brace who abatement in love, ally and ascertain she is dying of cancer. It was a amateur agent affirmed to accomplish readers cry and critics scream.

A abundant bigger admirers bent up with the blur version, which starred Ryan O'Neal and Ali MacGraw. Directed by Arthur Hiller, with a plaintive, Henry Mancini-composed affair song that wouldn't quit, "Love Story" acquired seven Oscar nominations — including one for Segal for autograph the screenplay, as able-bodied as for best picture, best administrator and best amateur and actress. It won one Oscar, for best music.

Segal additionally wrote a sequel, "Oliver's Story," appear in 1977, and fabricated into a film, with O'Neal afresh in the advance macho role. Segal would after say that Oliver was based in allotment on a brace of Harvard undergraduates who after became absolutely able-bodied known: Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones. (He acknowledged letters that Jenny was based on Gore's approaching wife, Tipper).

He was adored, and mocked. The acclaimed "Love Story" band — "Love agency never accepting to say you're sorry" — became a civic catchphrase, but provided amaranthine fodder for jokes. John Lennon countered that "Love agency accepting to say you're apologetic every 15 minutes."

Even O'Neal parodied his beforehand role. In the ball "What's Up Doc?", he responded to the acclaimed band with the riposte, "That's the dumbest affair I anytime heard."

A rabbi's son, built-in in New York City in 1937, Segal additionally had a long, acclaimed bookish career in classics, accepting a doctorate at Harvard and teaching at Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth while autograph era-defining screenplays and novels. He formed on surreal accepted works like the 1968 cine to the activated Beatles blur "Yellow Submarine" while additionally publishing works on Greek tragedy, Latin balladry and age-old athletics.

At his funeral, his babe Francesca batten of the ability that had been destroyed by Parkinson's disease.

"In (Tom) Stoppard's Arcadia, Thomasina mourns the afire of the library of Alexandria and the losses of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides — all of Aristotle's own library destroyed. And the angel has for years fabricated me anticipate of my father, all his bookishness and ability and wit and puns and being captivated in the bonfire of acoustic disease," she said in a acclaim she delivered at his burial and after e-mailed to the AP.

In the eulogy, she added: "That he fought to breathe, fought to live, every additional of the aftermost 30 years of affliction with such alarming obduracy, is a attestation to the amount of who he was — a dark obsessionality that saw him accompany his teaching, his writing, his active and my mother, with aloof the aforementioned tenacity. He was the best adamant man any of us will anytime know."

Segal was an honorary adolescent of Wolfson Academy at Oxford University.

He is survived by his wife, Karen James, and daughters Francesca, 29, and Miranda, 20.