It may come as a surprise to many that George Furth, who has died of a lung infection aged 75, was not only a character actor whose face was familiar from scores of TV shows and movies, but also a playwright who collaborated with Stephen Sondheim on three stage shows, including Company, one of the most innovative and cynical of Broadway musicals.
As an actor, Furth had already made appearances in numerous TV series and a dozen films, when he wrote a sequence of tenuously linked one-act plays. When no producer could be found, Furth turned to his friend Sondheim, who in turn showed the work to director Harold Prince. Prince suggested they made a musical out of the playlets, and the result was Company, which ran for 690 performances from 1970, winning Tony awards for best musical and best book for Furth. It was the pinnacle of his career.
Although constructed as a series of vignettes in no particular chronological order, the plot revolves around the 35th birthday of Robert, a bachelor unable to commit to a steady relationship, let alone marriage. He is surrounded by his three girlfriends and five couples, married, divorced, and soon-to-be married. Despite his claims that he is ready to marry, Robert is determined to remain single, mainly because of the examples of his friends plagued by infidelity, drugs, alcohol, verbal abuse and ridiculous fads that characterise middle-class New Yorkers of the "me generation". But, as one of his friends says, "Married people are no more a marriage than musicians are music. Just because some of the people might be wrong doesn't matter. It is still right."
Company has been revived many times over the years, sometimes updated to the Aids era, although requests from producers to give the show a homosexual slant were turned down by the unmarried Sondheim and Furth, although both of them were gay.
Born in Chicago with the name of George Schweinfurth (he dropped the "schwein" on becoming an actor), he graduated from Northwestern University with a bachelor's degree in speech in 1954 and received a master of fine arts degree from Columbia University in 1956.
Furth started acting in small theatres soon afterwards, getting to Broadway in 1961 in A Cook for Mr General, with Dustin Hoffman in one of his first roles. It flopped, as did the musical Hot Spot (1963), Judy Holliday's last Broadway show. But the gawky Furth, who specialised in nervous, oddball characters, began to get lots of work on television at the beginning of the 60s, something which continued into the 90s.
At the same time, he was appearing in films, notably Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), in which Furth plays the stubborn agent for the railroad, who refuses to allow the outlaws to get to the safe in the railway car, despite the warnings of Cassidy (Paul Newman). After being injured in the dynamite explosion that follows, the bruised and bandaged agent again defends the money on a second encounter. "Butch - you know that if it were my money, there is nobody that I would rather have steal it than you, but you see I am still in the employ of Mr EH Harriman of the Union Pacific railroad.'
A few years later, Furth was in another western, Mel Brooks' lampoon Blazing Saddles (1974), as one of the many townsfolk called Johnson - his name being Van Johnson. Warren Beatty, who first met Furth in 1955, cast him as a banker in Shampoo (1975) and again more than two decades later in Bulworth (1998). In the meantime, Furth was living his parallel career as a writer.
Twigs (1971), four interconnected plays about four women, all from the same family, all played by Sada Thompson, ran for nine months on Broadway. Other straight plays, The Supporting Cast (1981), Precious Sons (1986) and Getting Away With Murder (1996), the last co-written with Sondheim, were less successful despite some good reviews.
Returning to the musical theatre after Company, he provided the book for the John Kander-Fred Ebb musical The Act (1977) which served as an excellent vehicle for the singing, dancing and acting talents of Liza Minnelli. His second collaboration with Sondheim was Merrily We Roll Along (1981), a Broadway musical based on the George Kaufman-Moss Hart play, which famously presents the story in reverse order, with the jaded film producer moving back in time from 1980 to an idealistic young man with a promising future in 1955. Rather too downbeat for the time, it ran for only 16 performances, but has since been revived successfully.
Furth, who always flashed a large grin at photographers, was a very private person. Whenever approached journalists, he would say, "I just don't do interviews. That's why I have so many friends."
· George Furth, playwright and actor; born December 14 1932; died August 11 2008