George Furth, an actor and Tony Award-winning playwright who wrote the book for the 1970 Broadway musical “Company” and also wrote the 1971 play “Twigs,” died Monday.
He was 75.
Mr. Furth died at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif., according to Dennis Aspland, his agent.
Aspland, who said Mr. Furth had been healthy as recently as a week ago, did not know the cause of death.
“As a writer and as an actor and as an enthusiast, I think he epitomized those things in theater and entertainment that are good,” said actor Warren Beatty.
Mr. Furth, a Chicago native, and Beatty were close friends who first met at Northwestern University in the 1950s when Beatty was 18 years old and Mr. Furth had returned for a visit to his alma mater.
“I’ve never known anybody with more genuine friendships,” Beatty told the Los Angeles Times on Monday. “Everybody who knew him loved him.”
Mr. Furth won both a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for best book of a musical for “Company,” which ran on Broadway from 1970 to 1972 with Dean Jones and then Larry Kert as the central character.
“Company,” with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, is the story of a young bachelor in Manhattan who is surrounded by married couples, all of whom have different attitudes about him being single.
“‘Company’ is the show that put him on the map,” Miles Kreuger, president of the Los Angeles-based Institute of the American Musical, told the Los Angeles Times on Monday. “It’s one of the most important musicals of its era.
“‘Company’ tells us more about the cynicism of urban America in the 1970s than all the sociological tracts ever written. It is a work of considerable wisdom.”
Mr. Furth also wrote the book, and Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics, for “Merrily We Roll Along,” the 1981 musical based on the George Kaufman-Moss Hart play.
Mr. Furth and Sondheim also co-wrote the 1996 play “Getting Away with Murder,” which had a short run on Broadway.
Mr. Furth, who wrote the book for the 1977 musical “The Act,” also was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for outstanding new play for “Precious Sons” in the mid-1980s.
His 1981 comedy “The Supporting Cast” had a brief run on Broadway.
Mr. Furth had a long movie career as a character actor, appearing in more than 85 films and TV show episodes from the early 1960s to the late 1990s.
He may be remembered best for his role in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
He played Woodcock, the devoted railroad clerk who refuses to open the train car containing the safe for the outlaws.
Mr. Furth also played the banker from whom Beatty’s libidinous Beverly Hills hairdresser character tries to get a loan in the 1975 movie “Shampoo.”
“I loved what he did for us,” Beatty said. “He was a great comedian, George.”
Mr. Furth, born George Schweinfurth on Dec. 14, 1932, in Chicago, graduated from Northwestern University with a bachelor’s degree in speech in 1954 and later received a master of fine arts degree from Columbia University in 1956.
Aspland said Furth had no known immediate surviving family members.
