Walter Matthau

Walter John Matthau (né Matthow; /ˈmæθaʊ/ MATH-ow; October 1, 1920 – July 1, 2000) was an American screen and stage actor, known for his "hangdog face" and for playing world-weary characters. He starred in 10 films alongside his real-life friend Jack Lemmon, including The Odd Couple (1968) and Grumpy Old Men (1993). The New York Times called this "one of Hollywood's most successful pairings". Among other accolades, he was an Academy Award, a two-time BAFTA Award, and two-time Tony Award winner.
On Broadway, Matthau originated the role of Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple by playwright Neil Simon, for which he received a Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Play in 1965, his second after A Shot in the Dark in 1962. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the Billy Wilder film The Fortune Cookie (1966), with further Best Actor nominations for Kotch (1971) and The Sunshine Boys (1975). He gained further recognition for his portrayal of the coach of a hapless little league team in the baseball comedy The Bad News Bears (1976).
Matthau is also known for his performances in Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957), the Elvis Presley vehicle King Creole (1958), Stanley Donen's romance Charade (1963), Fail Safe (1964), Gene Kelly's musical Hello, Dolly! (1969), Elaine May's screwball comedy A New Leaf (1971) and Herbert Ross's ensemble comedy California Suite (1978). He also starred in Plaza Suite (1971), Charley Varrick (1973), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), The Sunshine Boys (1975), House Calls (1978), Hopscotch (1980) and Dennis the Menace (1993).
In 1982, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Matthau was born Walter John Matthow on October 1, 1920, in New York City's Lower East Side. He had two brothers, one older and one younger.
His parents were Jewish; his mother, Rose (née Berolsky or Beransky), was a Lithuanian immigrant who worked in a garment sweatshop, and his father, Milton Matuschansky, was a Ukrainian peddler and electrician from Kyiv. They married in New York in 1917.
A New York Times interview described his early years: "When Matthau was 3 years old, and his older brother, Henry, was 5, his father…lit out for parts unknown, leaving him and his brother to be raised by their mother….In 1935…Matthau learned of his father’s death in Bellvue Hospital….During his childhood, Matthau…lived in a succession of cold-water tenement apartments in the Ukrainian area of the Lower East Side…being forced to vacate each apartment after only a few months because they’d got so hopelessly far behind in the rent that their landlord would have them evicted….Matthau…hasn’t the slightest nostalgia these days for his poverty-ridden childhood, ‘It was a nightmare—a dreadful, horrible, stinking nightmare,’ he grimly remembers.”
As part of a lifelong love of practical jokes, Matthau created the rumors that his middle name was Foghorn and his last name was originally Matuschanskayasky (under which he is credited for a cameo role in the film Earthquake).
As a young boy, Matthau attended a Jewish non-profit sleepaway camp, Tranquillity Camp, where he began acting in the shows that the camp staged on Saturday nights. He also attended Surprise Lake Camp. His high school was Seward Park High School. He worked for a short time as a concession stand cashier in the Yiddish Theatre District.
During World War II, Matthau saw active service as a radioman-gunner on a Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber in the U.S. Army Air Forces with the Eighth Air Force in England. He was with the same 453rd Bombardment Group as James Stewart. While based in England at RAF Old Buckenham, Norfolk, he flew missions to continental Europe during the Battle of the Bulge. He ended the war with the rank of Staff Sergeant and returned home to America for demobilization at the war's end, intent on pursuing a career as an actor.
Matthau was trained in acting at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School with German director Erwin Piscator. He often joked that his best early review came in a play where he posed as a derelict. One reviewer said, "The others just looked like actors in make-up, Walter Matthau really looks like a skid row bum!" Matthau was a respected stage actor for years in such fare as Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and A Shot in the Dark, for his performance in the latter winning the 1962 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play.
Matthau appeared in the pilot of Mister Peepers (1952) with Wally Cox. For reasons unknown, he used the name Leonard Elliot. His role was of the gym teacher Mr. Wall. He made his motion picture debut as a whip-wielding bad guy in The Kentuckian (1955) opposite Burt Lancaster. He played a villain in King Creole (1958), in which he gets beaten up by Elvis Presley. Around the same time, he made Ride a Crooked Trail with Audie Murphy, and Onionhead (both 1958) starring Andy Griffith; the latter a box-office flop. Matthau and Griffith appeared previously the critical and box-office hit A Face in the Crowd (1957), directed by Elia Kazan. Matthau appeared with James Mason in Bigger Than Life (1956), directed by Nicholas Ray. Matthau directed a low-budget film called The Gangster Story (1960) and played a sympathetic sheriff in Lonely Are the Brave (1962), which starred Kirk Douglas. He appeared in the Cary Grant-Audrey Hepburn crime thriller Charade (1963).
On television, he appeared twice on Naked City, as well as in four installments of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He appeared eight times between 1962 and 1964 on The DuPont Show of the Week and as Franklin Gaer in an episode of Dr. Kildare ("Man Is a Rock", 1964).
Comedies were rare in Matthau's work at that time. He was cast in a number of stark dramas, such as Fail Safe (1964), in which he portrayed Pentagon adviser Dr. Groeteschele, who urges an all-out nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in response to an accidental transmission of an attack signal to U.S. Air Force bombers. Neil Simon cast him in the play The Odd Couple in 1965, with Matthau playing slovenly sportswriter Oscar Madison, opposite Art Carney as Felix Ungar. Matthau reprised the role in the film version, with Jack Lemmon as Felix Unger. He played detective Ted Casselle in the Hitchcockian thriller Mirage (1965), directed by Edward Dmytryk.
He achieved great success in the comedy film The Fortune Cookie (1966) as shyster lawyer William H. "Whiplash Willie" Gingrich, starring yet again opposite Lemmon; the first of many collaborations with Billy Wilder, and a role that would earn him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Filming had to be placed on a five-month hiatus after Matthau had a serious heart attack. He gave up his three-pack-a-day smoking habit as a result. Matthau appeared during the Oscar telecast shortly after having been injured in a bicycle accident; nonetheless, he scolded actors who had not attended the ceremony, especially the other major award winners that night: Paul Scofield, Elizabeth Taylor and Sandy Dennis. Broadway-hits-cum-films continued to cast Matthau in lead roles such as Hello, Dolly! and Cactus Flower (both 1969); for the latter, Goldie Hawn received an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
It was during this time that Matthau began to appear in more comedy films, including the black comedy A New Leaf (1971) and the comedy-drama Pete 'n' Tillie (1972). Oscar nominations would come his way again for Kotch (1971), directed by Lemmon, and The Sunshine Boys (1975). The latter was another adaptation of a Neil Simon stage play—this time about a pair of former vaudeville stars. For the latter, he won a Golden Globe award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, tying with his co-star George Burns. Meanwhile, their other co-star, Richard Benjamin, won a supporting award.
Matthau played three roles in the film version of Simon's Plaza Suite (1971), and was in the cast of its followup California Suite (1978). He starred in House Calls (1978), sharing the screen with Glenda Jackson and his Odd Couple stage partner, Carney.
Matthau starred in three crime dramas in the mid-1970s: as a detective investigating a mass murder on a bus in The Laughing Policeman (1973), as a bank robber on the run from the Mafia and the law in Charley Varrick (also 1973) and as a New York transit official in the action-thriller The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974). He also reunited with Lemmon in the black comedy-drama The Front Page (1974). A change of pace about misfits and delinquents on a Little League baseball team turned out to be a solid hit when Matthau starred as coach Morris Buttermaker in the comedy The Bad News Bears (1976).
Matthau produced some films with Universal Pictures, with his son Charlie also becoming involved in his production company, Walcar Productions, but the only film that he produced was the third remake of Little Miss Marker (1980).
He was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for his portrayal of former CIA field operative Miles Kendig in the elaborate spy comedy Hopscotch (1980), reuniting with Jackson. The original script, a dark work based on the novel of the same name, was rewritten and transformed into a comedy in order to play to Matthau's specific talents. The rewrite was a condition of his participation. Matthau participated in the script revisions, and the film's director Ronald Neame observed that Matthau's contributions entitled him to screen credit, but that was never pursued. Matthau wrote the scene in which Kendig and Isobel—apparently strangers—meet in a Salzburg restaurant and strike up a conversation about wine that ends in a passionate kiss. He also wrote the last scene of the film, where Kendig, presumed to be dead, disguises himself as a Sikh to enter a bookshop. He also helped to choose appropriate compositions by Mozart that made up much of the score. TCM's Susan Doll observes that "Hopscotch could be considered the end of a long career peak or the beginning of (Matthau's) slide downhill, depending on the viewpoint", as character parts and supporting parts became the only thing available to an actor his age.
The next year, he was nominated again for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for his portrayal of the fictional Associate Justice Daniel Snow in First Monday in October (1981). The film was about the (then-fictional) first appointment of a woman (played by Jill Clayburgh) to the Supreme Court of the United States. It was scheduled for release in 1982, but when President Ronald Reagan named Sandra Day O'Connor in July 1981, the release date was moved up to August 1981. The New York Times critic Janet Maslin disliked the film but praised Matthau's performance.
Matthau reunited with Lemmon in the comedy Buddy Buddy (1981). He also portrayed Herbert Tucker in I Ought to Be in Pictures (1982) with Ann-Margret and Dinah Manoff. He co-starred with Robin Williams in the 1983 dark comedy film The Survivors. Although a box-office dud that barely grossed its budget, the film found a new audience via repeated broadcasts on cable TV in the following years. He took the leading role of Captain Thomas Bartholomew Red in Roman Polanski's swashbuckler Pirates (1986).
During the 1980s and 1990s, Matthau served on the advisory board of the National Student Film Institute.
Matthau narrated the Doctor Seuss Video Classics: How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1992), and played the role of George Wilson in the film Dennis the Menace (1993). In a change of pace, Matthau played Albert Einstein in the film I.Q. (1994) starring Tim Robbins and Meg Ryan.
His partnership with Jack Lemmon became one of the most enduring collaborations in Hollywood. They became lifelong friends after making The Fortune Cookie and would make a total of 10 movies together—11 counting Kotch, in which Lemmon has a cameo as a sleeping bus passenger. Apart from their many comedies, the two appeared (although they did not share any scenes) in the Oliver Stone drama JFK (1991). Matthau and Lemmon reunited for the comedy Grumpy Old Men (1993), co-starring Ann-Margret, and its sequel Grumpier Old Men (1995), co-starring Sophia Loren. This led to further pairings late in their careers, including appearances in The Grass Harp (1995), Out to Sea (1997) and a Simon-scripted sequel to their much earlier success, The Odd Couple II (1998).
Hanging Up (2000), directed by Diane Keaton, was Matthau's final appearance onscreen.
In 1948, Matthau married Geraldine "Geri" Grace Johnson. Their son David was born in 1953 and their daughter Jenny was born in 1956. The couple divorced in 1959.
Matthau married Carol Marcus in 1959. She died in 2003. Their son Charles (Charlie) Matthau was born in 1962. Charlie is a director and directed his father in several movies.
In 1971, Matthau discussed his longtime compulsive gambling with a writer for The New York Times. In 1961, while doing a two-week television shoot in Florida for Tallahassee 7000, he had lost $183,000 (equivalent to US$1,925,576 in 2024), mostly betting on spring-training baseball games. It took Matthau six years to pay off his "Mafia-connected bookmaker", and he somewhat curtailed his betting in the 1970s, although daily racetrack losses of $400–500 were common.
A heavy smoker, Matthau had a heart attack in 1966 while filming The Fortune Cookie, the first of at least three in his lifetime.
In 1976, ten years after his first heart attack, he underwent heart-bypass surgery. After working in Minnesota for Grumpy Old Men (1993), he was hospitalized for double pneumonia. In December 1995, he had a colon tumor removed, apparently successfully, as there was no mention of cancer in his death certificate. He was hospitalized in May 1999 for more than two months, again owing to pneumonia.
His death certificate lists the causes of death as "cardiac arrest" and "atherosclerotic heart disease", with "end stage renal disease" and "atrial fibrillation" as significant contributing factors. There is no mention of cancer.
In the late evening of June 30, 2000, Matthau had a heart attack at his home and was taken by ambulance to the St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, where he died a few hours later at 1:42 a.m. on July 1, 2000, at age 79. He is buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. Matthau's wife Carol Marcus died in 2003, and her body is interred in the same plot as her husband.