Love Story author Segal dies aged 72
Love Story author Erich Segal dies aged 72
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By Matt Hallam. |  |
Wednesday, 20, Jan 2010 09:25
By Lewis Bazley.
Erich Segal, the author of iconic romance novel Love Story, has died after a heart attack at his London home aged 72, his daughter has confirmed.
Segal, a Yale classics professor during the writing of Love Story, suffered a heart attack on Sunday after a long battle with Parkinson's Disease.
Segal's novel Love Story, about the doomed romance between a rich Harvard student and working-class girl, became America's bestselling novel in 1970 and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw.
Featuring the tagline "Love means never having to say you're sorry", Love Story was nominated for seven Oscars, including a nod for Segal's screenplay, and won the best original score Academy award.
Segal wrote several other novels, as well as the screenplay for the animated Beatles film Yellow Submarine and Shirley MacLaine drama A Change of Seasons.
Delivering the eulogy for her father on Tuesday, his daughter Francesca Segal was quoted by the BBC as saying: "That he fought to breathe, fought to live, every second of the last 30 years of illness with such mind-blowing obduracy, is a testament to the core of who he was, a blind obsessionality that saw him pursue his teaching, his writing, his running and my mother, with just the same tenacity.
"He was the most dogged man any of us will ever know."
Segal is survived by his wife and collaborator, Karen, his elder daughter, writer Francesca, and his younger daughter Miranda, a Bristol University student.