Erich Segal: author of Love Story

However, after Segal decided to rework it as a novel, the actress Ali MacGraw, an old friend he had known as a student, read the script and decided she wanted to play the girl. Her acting career was just taking off and she persuaded Segal to change the character from Jewish to Italian-American and persuaded Paramount to buy the rights and make the film.

By the time the novel was published at the beginning of 1970 the film was already in production, with Ryan O’Neal as Oliver Barrett IV, the wealthy Harvard socialite, and MacGraw as Jenny Cavalleri, the girl from the wrong side of the tracks who, loves Mozart and the Beatles, and dies.

It was the highest-grossing film of 1971. It cost about $2 million and took more than $100 million in North America alone. Francis Lai’s sweeping, Oscar-winning theme perfectly complemented the scale of Oliver’s highs and lows. It was given lyrics by Carl Sigman and the ballad Where Do I Begin took on a life of its own. Andy Williams had a big hit with it and it has been covered by numerous other singers.

While Segal’s day job was teaching Classics at Yale University, he did already have a background in popular music himself. He had been the lyricist for several musicals, including a musical version of the Odyssey, starring Yul Brynner. He briefly collaborated with Richard Rodgers and he was one of the writers on the Beatles animated film Yellow Submarine (1968), which brought him a certain celebrity status at Yale.

Segal, who received an Oscar nomination for the Love Story script, wrote a sequel, Oliver’s Story (1977), which was turned into a film, with O’Neal reprising the role of Oliver and Candice Bergen playing the new woman in his life, though Oliver continues to struggle to come to terms with Jenny’s death. Segal attempted to maintain parallel careers as a popular novelist and a Classical scholar, moving to England, and becoming an honorary Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford.

The son of a rabbi, Erich Wolf Segal was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1937. He spent much of his infancy with his grandparents. His daughter, Francesca, wrote in an article in Granta magazine in 2008: “With an ailing grandmother trapped downstairs and an absent, driven grandfather running his fabric store in Manhattan, my father’s earliest memories are of performing on that stage to an invented crowd; filling a solitary world with companions from his imagination. He wrote plays and performed them, emoting to an echoing and empty theatre. Inventing people became a powerful defence against loneliness.”

He studied Classical literature at Harvard University, had a particular interest in Ancient comedy and did what is regarded as breakthrough work on what the Ancient Romans found funny. He adapted his dissertation for commercial publication as Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus (1968). He also translated several of Plautus’s comedies.

He met the composer Joe Raposo at Harvard and worked with him on revues. Sing, Muse!, a musical comedy set during the Trojan War, was staged off-Broadway in 1961-62 and Richard Rodgers approached Segal to collaborate on a project called You Can’t Get There from Here, though it was never staged. He wrote the lyrics for Odyssey, which was staged in Washington with Yul Brynner. He also taught at Harvard, before moving to Yale, where his involvement with Yellow Submarine made him something of a luminary a couple of years before Love Story came out. It was inspired by a conversation he overheard in 1968 about a girl who supported her husband through graduate school and then died. “I sat down and started writing immediately,” he said. “The story poured out of me.”

The success of Love Story surprised virtually everyone, particularly in the movie business, where it was felt that such old-fashioned weepies were outdated. But the themes of love against the odds, parental disapproval, misunderstandings and the cruel hand of fate, in the form of leukaemia, remained as powerful as ever. The public appreciated the book, its simple style and emotions, but it proved too big a challenge for many critics (though not all). Several judges threatened to resign if it were not removed from consideration for the National Book Award. They got their way.

At about the same time Segal also wrote the scripts for the college drama R.P.M. (1970), with Anthony Quinn and Ann-Margret, and Michael Winner’s underrated film The Games (1970), a study of the contrasting preparations and characters of four Olympic marathon runners, back at a time when such athletes were truly amateurs. O’Neal played the American hopeful and Michael Crawford was the English milkman with eyes on Olympic glory. Segal had been an athlete at college and would later report on Olympic athletics for ABC television.

He faced resentment, disapproval and outright hostility within the academic establishment, which stopped just short of a formal charge of bringing the game into disrepute. For several years he turned his back on popular culture, even declining an invitation to attend a royal premiere in London. “If the price of being a professor is never daring to write another Love Story, I will pay the price,” he said. He took leave of absence from Yale at the end of 1971 and subsequently taught at Munich, Princeton and Dartmouth.

But the public, the publishers and the studios demanded to know what Oliver did next and he finally agreed to write a sequel. Other work followed, including the scripts for A Change of Seasons (1980), with Shirley MacLaine and Anthony Hopkins, and Man, Woman and Child (1982), an adaptation of his own novel, with Martin Sheen. Other novels include The Class (1985), Doctors (1988) and Prizes (1995). He continued to write after being given a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease more than 25 years ago.

He is survived by Karen, a former book editor and his wife of 35 years, and by two daughters.

Erich Segal, writer and academic, was born on June 16, 1937. He died of a heart attack on January 17, 2010, aged 72