George Furth

Biography

Date of Birth 14 December 1932, Chicago, Illinois, USA Date of Death 11 August 2008, Santa Monica, California, USA Birth Name George Schweinfurth George Furth is a Tony Award-winning American librettist, playwright, and actor. Born George Schweinfurth in Chicago, Illinois, Furth majored in Drama & Theatre at Northwestern University and received his Master's degree from Columbia. He made his Broadway debut as an actor in the 1961 play A Cook for Mr. General, followed by the musical Hot Spot two years later, but in New York City theatre circles he is known more as a playwright than a performer, especially for his collaborations with Stephen Sondheim, the highly successful Company and the ill-fated Merrily We Roll Along, a bomb that eventually drew a cult following. He also penned the plays Twigs, The Supporting Cast, and Precious Sons, and wrote the book for the Kander and Ebb musical The Act. Frequently cast as a bespectacled, nerdish, ineffectual type, Furth appeared in such films as Blazing Saddles, The Best Man, Myra Breckinridge, Oh God!, Hooper, The Cannonball Run, Young Doctors in Love, Doctor Detroit, Bulworth, and in perhaps his best remembered role, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in which he portrayed Woodcock, the railroad guard robbed twice by the titular pair. His many television credits include Tammy, McHale's Navy, F Troop, Ironside, I Dream of Jeannie, That Girl, Green Acres, The Odd Couple, Bonanza, Happy Days, All in the Family, Murphy Brown, L.A. Law, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, Murder, She Wrote, and the made-for-TV movie The Scarlett O'Hara War, in which he portrayed famed film director George Cukor. He adapted Twigs for a 1975 television production starring Carol Burnett. Furth won both the Tony and Drama Desk Award for Best Book of a Musical for Company, and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play for Precious Sons.