Factfile
Name: Erich Segal
Occupation: writer
Born: 1937
Lives: New York and London
Famous for: Being the author of soppy Seventies book and movie Love Story
Why in the news: the film rights to his new novel Only Love have just been bought by CBS TV in the US for a record sum
Most likely to say: Love is never having to say you're sorry
Least likely to say: Sorry
In the Sixties there were two types of people, those who liked the Beatles and those who liked the Stones. In the early Seventies the world of popular culture was divided between those who cried buckets at Erich Segal's Love Story and those who cried: "Pass the bucket" while under strict orders to continue passing the Kleenex.
The former, it has to be said, largely outnumbered the latter, and the tale of a preppy Harvard student and his free-spirited but terminally ill girlfriend became a worldwide best-seller and one of the biggest grossing movies of that decade.
The screenplay won its author a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. It transformed him from a preppy Harvard graduate into a rich and famous preppy Harvard graduate.
There were other awards, too, including, along with Peter Ustinov and Mother Teresa, the Premio San Valeatin' di Terni for "furthering the cause of love, understanding and peace throughout the world".
And now, in the best cinematic tradition, Erich Segal is back.
He had never really gone away, you know. Mr Segal has been up to all kinds of literary antics since he reduced cinema audiences to tears in 1970. Yes, he has had a string of best-selling novels, Man Woman and Child, Class, Prize and Doctors, that have fed the appetite of those who adore him for his slushy sentimental side.
But Mr Segal has also been stimulating himself intellectually. The author of that legendary line, "Love is never having to say you're sorry", also writes classics in his spare time.
If Segal starred in a movie about a novelist with a split personality it would be called Dr Love and Mr Aristotle. The Dr Love side of Segal wrote a sequel to Love Story called Oliver's Story which was turned into a rather less successful movie.
Mr Aristotle meanwhile spent months in Oxford (where he is a fellow) penning his thoughts on the great philosophers. His well-received academic offerings include The Oxford Readings in Greek Tragedy, The Dialogue of Plato and, more recently, The Oxford Readings in Aristophanes.
"It was a best-seller," he quipped in a recent interview. "It sold 1,000 copies."
He also wrote the script for the Beatles' surreal cartoon The Yellow Submarine while a lecturer at Yale University.
Go figure.
He was born in 1937 in New York, and his parentage hinted eccentrically at the greatness he would one day achieve. His literary gifts can be traced back to his father, a rabbi, who Segal said recently was "so talented he didn't know where to move."
His dad was a poet and sculptor who died of a heart attack at the age of 52.
His mother's finest hour was when she was one of Idi Amin's hostages when the plane she was on was hijacked at Entebbe. "She got everyone organised. Then when it was all over she went back to being a Yiddisher mama," he said in an interview this week with The Guardian.
He wrote Love Story while lecturing on Greek and Roman literature at Yale (where he was professor of classics). It is Harvard, though, where Segal was a student, that was his main inspiration for his weepy book.
Last December US Vice-President Al Gore, a former classmate of Segal's in Harvard, declared that the story was based on himself and his wife, Tipper.
When pressed by fans, Segal refused to reveal the exact inspiration for the book's leading male, Oliver Barrett (played by Ryan O'Neal in the film). But he did say that it was modelled on a mix of Gore and his then roommate at Harvard, Tommy Lee Jones. The actor Tommy Lee Jones that is, who subsequently featured in Love Story the movie.
Segal is married with two children and divides his time between London and New York. Despite, or perhaps because of, his almost iconic status among lovers of his unashamedly sentimental fare, he remains a determinedly private person.
During an interview he recently made a journalist promise he would not reveal exactly where he lived or the names of his two children. An embarrassed receptionist at Wolfson College, Oxford, told The Irish Times that they could not pass messages on to him.
"We have been asked not to," he said.
While they are unlikely to be granted a private audience with Segal, fans who blubbed their way through Love Story won't be disappointed by Only Love, which has been sold for a record sum to CBS TV, which plans to make it into a mini-series.
The publisher's blurb says it is the story of Matthew Hiller, a world-renowned neurobiologist who developed a radical genetic technique for treating incurable brain tumours.
"When contacted by a wealthy man whose wife is dying, Matthew is stunned to discover that his new and desperate patient is Silvia, the love of his life, who disappeared without explanation 20 years ago on the eve of their marriage."
Pass the Kleenex/bucket.