Walter Matthau - Actors and Actresses - Films as Actor:, Films as Director:, Publications Walter Matthau - Actors and Actresses Walter Matthau - Actors and Actresses Nationality: American. Born: Walter Matuschanskayasky (some sources say Matasschanskayasky) in New York City, 1 October 1920. Education: Attended the New School for Social Research Dramatic Workshop under Irwin Piscator. Military Service: U.S. Air Force as a radioman-gunner, 1942–45. Family: Married 1) Grace Johnson, 1948 (divorced 1958), one son and daughter; 2) Carol Marcus Saroyan, 1959, one son: the director Charles Matthau.

Career: Worked as a child actor in the New York Yiddish theater; made professional adult stage debut, 1946; worked in summer stock and on Broadway, 1948; later stage work includes roles in Once More , with Feeling , 1958, A Shot in the Dark , 1962, and The Odd Couple , 1965; made film debut in The Kentuckian, 1955; appeared in the TV series Tallahassee 7000, 1959; directed the film Gangster Story, 1960. Awards: Best Supporting Actor Academy Award, for The Fortune Cookie , 1966; Best Actor British Academy Award, for Pete 'n' Tillie and Charley Varrick , 1973; Best Motion Picture Actor-Musical/Comedy Golden Globe, for The Sunshine Boys, 1975; American Comedy Awards Lifetime Achievement Award, 1997. Died: Santa Monica, California, of a heart attack, 1 July 2000.

Films as Actor: Hanging Up (Keaton) (as Lou Mozell) Films as Director: Gangster Story (+ ro as Jack Martin) Publications By MATTHAU: articles— "Rumpled Royalty" (excerpt from "The Player—III," New Yorker , 4 November 1961), interview with Lillian Ross, in New Yorker , 31 May 1993. "Genius," interview with Karen Duffy, in Interview (New York), December 1994. "Kids!" interview with H.C. Beck, in Interview (New York), Janu-ary 1996. "An Interview with Walter Matthau," interview with E. May, in New Yorker , 25 November 1996. On MATTHAU: book— Hunter, Allan, Walter Matthau , New York, 1984. On MATTHAU: articles— Current Biography 1966 , New York, 1966. Eyles, Allen, "Walter Matthau," in Focus on Film (London), Spring 1972. Photoplay (London), January 1981 and April 1982.

Rubinstein, Leslie, "One Fortunate Cookie," in American Film (Washington, D.C.), July-August 1983. Film Dope (London), March 1989. Slodowski, Jan, "Walter Matthau," in Iluzjon (Warsaw), January-June 1990. Parkinson, David, "A Grumpy Old Couple," in Radio Times (Lon-don), 3 May 1997. * * * Walter Matthau was one of the motion picture industry's solid, respected character actors. He has 70 films to his credit, commencing—after years of acting on the stage, where he honed his craft—with The Kentuckian and The Indian Fighter in 1955. He was at his beloved best playing comically persnickety characters, generally opposite Jack Lemmon, his longtime co-star.

Early in his career, Matthau displayed his versatility in roles as dissimilar as Mel Miller, the astutely perceptive writer who sees through the sham of cynically manipulative television personality Lonesome Rhodes, in A Face in the Crowd ; Maxie Fields, the crime boss who menaces Elvis Presley, in King Creole ; and Sheriff Johnson, the Western lawman who doggedly pursues Kirk Douglas, in Lonely Are the Brave . At this stage of his career, Matthau did some extraordinary work in otherwise slight, forgettable films. In the Audie Murphy Western Ride a Crooked Trail , he offers a spirited performance as a flamboyant, dipsomaniacal judge. Matthau did not transcend his status as all-purpose character actor until, in an inspired bit of casting, he and Jack Lemmon played opposite each other in The Fortune Cookie . Matthau won an Oscar for his role as a crooked lawyer who fast-talks television cameraman Lemmon into an insurance fraud. In their best pairings, Lemmon and Matthau are cast as opposite character types who are contrasted to comic effect.

Perhaps their best film is The Odd Couple , with its humor deriving from the disparate characters of slob-supreme Oscar Madison (a role which Matthau originated on Broadway) and fastidious neatnik Felix Ungar (Lemmon). Over the course of three-plus decades, Matthau and Lemmon became as famous a team as Tracy and Hepburn and Hope and Crosby. A Matthau-Lemmon-like relationship is the basis of the comedy in The Sunshine Boys , in which Matthau and George Burns play two cantankerous former vaudevillains induced into reuniting for a television show. Matthau was at his funniest playing the gloriously ornery slob whom you might find sitting across a card table, with cigar in one hand and beer can in the other as he hangs out with his cronies. The comedy is derived from his characters' becoming involved in unlikely situations. In The Odd Couple , Matthau's Oscar Madison becomes the roommate of Felix Ungar. In The Bad News Bears , Matthau's Morris Buttermaker, another slob-supreme, is coerced into coaching a team of Little League misfits.

In these films, he combines a sort of grouchy shiftiness with soul, wit, cunning, nonjudgmental forbearance, and obstinate persistence. Later on in his career, he caricatured this persnickety persona in Dennis the Menace , playing the forever-flustered Mr. Wilson. He was also expert at playing drawing room comedy, cast in roles that in an earlier era would have been tailor-made for Spencer Tracy. In these films, Matthau effectively plays on the tensions between social coexistence and masculine awkwardness. Indeed, in First Monday in October , he and co-star Jill Clayburgh, playing Supreme Court justices with contrasting political philosophies, closely replicate a Tracy-Hepburn relationship. In Plaza Suite , he offers a tour de force playing three disparate roles, teamed with three different actresses: the jaded, adulterous husband of Maureen Stapleton; a Hollywood producer attempting to seduce ex-girlfriend Barbara Harris; and a father of the bride, married to Lee Grant. He also has played the older man who becomes a romantic object. In Hello, Dolly! , he is a brusque self-made man matrimonially targeted by Barbra Streisand.

In Cactus Flower , he is a defensively overworked dentist targeted by Ingrid Bergman. In House Calls , he is a widowed doctor targeted by Glenda Jackson. By the early 1970s, Matthau had become a top ten box-office star, quite an accomplishment for a craggy-faced actor with an unpolished gait and drooping posture, not to mention his trademark New York snarl. Lemmon, feeling that no film had really tapped Matthau's depths, directed him in Kotch , a humanistic comedy in which he plays an irascible grandfather put to pasture by his family. He also has appeared in several straight dramatic roles, as cops ( The Laughing Policeman , The Taking of Pelham One Two Three ), a stunt pilot-turned-luckless bank robber ( Charley Varick ), and an ex-CIA agent defying official embargoes on his memoirs ( Hopscotch ). All-too-often, Matthau's late-career roles were comedies in which he was prone to self-caricature. In addition to playing Mr. Wilson in Dennis the Menace , he re-teamed with Lemmon in Grumpy Old Men.

In the latter, the twosome play endlessly quarreling long-time friends who are senior citizen variations of The Odd Couple's Oscar and Felix. The film's success led to their pairing in a ho-hum follow-up, Grumpier Old Men, the idiotic Out to Sea, and the stale and needless Odd Couple II. Then in 2000 Matthau—looking every one of his eighty years—was cast in Hanging Up as the feisty, inconsiderate father of the film's three heroines. Matthau's better late-career parts were roles as sage (rather than self-absorbed) senior citizens. In I.Q. , he brought warmth to his role as Albert Einstein, who plays matchmaker for his niece and a garage mechanic. In The Grass Harp , directed by his son Charles—who looks like a younger, leaner, less craggier version of his dad—he is a wizened, widowed retired judge who idles away his hours sitting in his small town's barbershop and drugstore. As the scenario progresses, he comes to share a deeply moving relationship with a gentle-souled maiden aunt.

Here, Matthau displays his ability to play tender as well as persnickety, as his character talks of his late wife, and the meaning of love and how difficult and elusive it is to find. These sequences seem to be gifts that a devoted director-son would aspire to present to a beloved actor-father. —Raymond Durgnat, updated by Rob Edelman User Contributions: Walter Matthau facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles about Walter Matthau International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers COPYRIGHT 2001 The Gale Group Inc. MATTHAU, Walter Nationality: American. Born: Walter Matuschanskayasky (some sources say Matasschanskayasky) in New York City, 1 October 1920. Education: Attended the New School for Social Research Dramatic Workshop under Irwin Piscator. Military Service: U.S. Air Force as a radioman-gunner, 1942–45.

Family: Married 1) Grace Johnson, 1948 (divorced 1958), one son and daughter; 2) Carol Marcus Saroyan, 1959, one son: the director Charles Matthau. Career: Worked as a child actor in the New York Yiddish theater; made professional adult stage debut, 1946; worked in summer stock and on Broadway, 1948; later stage work includes roles in Once More, with Feeling, 1958, A Shot in the Dark, 1962, and The Odd Couple, 1965; made film debut in The Kentuckian, 1955; appeared in the TV series Tallahassee 7000, 1959; directed the film Gangster Story, 1960.

Awards: Best Supporting Actor Academy Award, for The Fortune Cookie, 1966; Best Actor British Academy Award, for Pete 'n' Tillie and Charley Varrick, 1973; Best Motion Picture Actor-Musical/Comedy Golden Globe, for The Sunshine Boys, 1975; American Comedy Awards Lifetime Achievement Award, 1997. Died: Santa Monica, California, of a heart attack, 1 July 2000. Films as Actor: Current Biography 1966, New York, 1966. Eyles, Allen, "Walter Matthau," in Focus on Film (London), Spring 1972. Photoplay (London), January 1981 and April 1982. Rubinstein, Leslie, "One Fortunate Cookie," in American Film (Washington, D.C.), July-August 1983. Film Dope (London), March 1989. Slodowski, Jan, "Walter Matthau," in Iluzjon (Warsaw), January-June 1990.

Parkinson, David, "A Grumpy Old Couple," in Radio Times (Lon-don), 3 May 1997. * * * Walter Matthau was one of the motion picture industry's solid, respected character actors. He has 70 films to his credit, commencing—after years of acting on the stage, where he honed his craft—with The Kentuckian and The Indian Fighter in 1955. He was at his beloved best playing comically persnickety characters, generally opposite Jack Lemmon, his longtime co-star. Early in his career, Matthau displayed his versatility in roles as dissimilar as Mel Miller, the astutely perceptive writer who sees through the sham of cynically manipulative television personality Lonesome Rhodes, in A Face in the Crowd; Maxie Fields, the crime boss who menaces Elvis Presley, in King Creole; and Sheriff Johnson, the Western lawman who doggedly pursues Kirk Douglas, in Lonely Are the Brave. At this stage of his career, Matthau did some extraordinary work in otherwise slight, forgettable films.

In the Audie Murphy Western Ride a Crooked Trail, he offers a spirited performance as a flamboyant, dipsomaniacal judge. Matthau did not transcend his status as all-purpose character actor until, in an inspired bit of casting, he and Jack Lemmon played opposite each other in The Fortune Cookie. Matthau won an Oscar for his role as a crooked lawyer who fast-talks television cameraman Lemmon into an insurance fraud. In their best pairings, Lemmon and Matthau are cast as opposite character types who are contrasted to comic effect. Perhaps their best film is The Odd Couple, with its humor deriving from the disparate characters of slob-supreme Oscar Madison (a role which Matthau originated on Broadway) and fastidious neatnik Felix Ungar (Lemmon). Over the course of three-plus decades, Matthau and Lemmon became as famous a team as Tracy and Hepburn and Hope and Crosby. A Matthau-Lemmon-like relationship is the basis of the comedy in The Sunshine Boys, in which Matthau and George Burns play two cantankerous former vaudevillains induced into reuniting for a television show.

Matthau was at his funniest playing the gloriously ornery slob whom you might find sitting across a card table, with cigar in one hand and beer can in the other as he hangs out with his cronies. The comedy is derived from his characters' becoming involved in unlikely situations. In The Odd Couple, Matthau's Oscar Madison becomes the roommate of Felix Ungar. In The Bad News Bears, Matthau's Morris Buttermaker, another slob-supreme, is coerced into coaching a team of Little League misfits. In these films, he combines a sort of grouchy shiftiness with soul, wit, cunning, nonjudgmental forbearance, and obstinate persistence. Later on in his career, he caricatured this persnickety persona in Dennis the Menace, playing the forever-flustered Mr. Wilson. He was also expert at playing drawing room comedy, cast in roles that in an earlier era would have been tailor-made for Spencer Tracy. In these films, Matthau effectively plays on the tensions between social coexistence and masculine awkwardness.

Indeed, in First Monday in October, he and co-star Jill Clayburgh, playing Supreme Court justices with contrasting political philosophies, closely replicate a Tracy-Hepburn relationship. In Plaza Suite, he offers a tour de force playing three disparate roles, teamed with three different actresses: the jaded, adulterous husband of Maureen Stapleton; a Hollywood producer attempting to seduce ex-girlfriend Barbara Harris; and a father of the bride, married to Lee Grant. He also has played the older man who becomes a romantic object. In Hello, Dolly!, he is a brusque self-made man matrimonially targeted by Barbra Streisand. In Cactus Flower, he is a defensively overworked dentist targeted by Ingrid Bergman. In House Calls, he is a widowed doctor targeted by Glenda Jackson. By the early 1970s, Matthau had become a top ten box-office star, quite an accomplishment for a craggy-faced actor with an unpolished gait and drooping posture, not to mention his trademark New York snarl.

Lemmon, feeling that no film had really tapped Matthau's depths, directed him in Kotch, a humanistic comedy in which he plays an irascible grandfather put to pasture by his family. He also has appeared in several straight dramatic roles, as cops (The Laughing Policeman, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three), a stunt pilot-turned-luckless bank robber (Charley Varick), and an ex-CIA agent defying official embargoes on his memoirs (Hopscotch). All-too-often, Matthau's late-career roles were comedies in which he was prone to self-caricature. In addition to playing Mr. Wilson in Dennis the Menace, he re-teamed with Lemmon in Grumpy Old Men. In the latter, the twosome play endlessly quarreling long-time friends who are senior citizen variations of The Odd Couple's Oscar and Felix. The film's success led to their pairing in a ho-hum follow-up, Grumpier Old Men, the idiotic Out to Sea, and the stale and needless Odd Couple II.

Then in 2000 Matthau—looking every one of his eighty years—was cast in Hanging Up as the feisty, inconsiderate father of the film's three heroines. Matthau's better late-career parts were roles as sage (rather than self-absorbed) senior citizens. In I.Q., he brought warmth to his role as Albert Einstein, who plays matchmaker for his niece and a garage mechanic. In The Grass Harp, directed by his son Charles—who looks like a younger, leaner, less craggier version of his dad—he is a wizened, widowed retired judge who idles away his hours sitting in his small town's barbershop and drugstore. As the scenario progresses, he comes to share a deeply moving relationship with a gentle-souled maiden aunt. Here, Matthau displays his ability to play tender as well as persnickety, as his character talks of his late wife, and the meaning of love and how difficult and elusive it is to find. These sequences seem to be gifts that a devoted director-son would aspire to present to a beloved actor-father.

—Raymond Durgnat, updated by Rob Edelman Cite this article COPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group Inc. Walter Matthau For half a century Walter Matthau (1920-2000) delighted theater, television, and movie audiences with his portrayals of a huge variety of characters. Al though known best for his comedy, Matthau could play any kind of role from romantic lead to grouchy slob to Supreme Court justice. Matthau was memorable as an actor because his face, posture, and voice were always his own, yet he had the ability to create a completely believable character. Off-screen, Matthau battled chronic gambling and health problems caused by smoking and an unhealthy diet. He loved to joke, and interviewers often had difficulty knowing what to believe when he spoke of his past. Friends and family adored him. His son Charlie, according to People Weekly, wrote in a Father's Day card, "You are a giant. The most loyal and patient husband, and as a father, a volcanic and infinite explosion of unconditional love, universal wisdom and a supernova of everything that is right and good in this world.

Apart from that, however, I'm not very pleased with you!" On reading it, Matthau broke down and cried and then never mentioned it again. Rough Beginnings Walter Matthau was born on October 1, 1920, in New York City. According to his son, Charlie Matthau, speaking on "Larry King Live," on July 14, 2000, his real last name was spelled Matthow. Walter Matuschanskayasky, which he claimed was his real name, was made up to run in the credits of Earthquake (1974), so Matthau could get even for being tricked into a much larger part in the movie than he had wanted. Matthau's Lithuanian seamstress mother, Rose, raised him alone in the mostly Jewish Lower East Side of New York. His father Milton, a former peddler from Kiev, Ukraine, became an electrician and then a process server. He abandoned Matthau and his older brother, Henry, when Matthau was a three-year-old. According to an article in People Weekly, Matthau ran a card game on the roof of his building when he was six years old.

He sold refreshments at local Yiddish theaters and broke into acting when, at age 11, he got a small part in The Dishwasher. He played bit parts in Yiddish musical comedies while still selling refreshments during the intervals. He was paid 50 cents for each of his occasional parts. "I was shaped by the whole experience of the Depression," he stated in an interview with The San Francisco Examiner in 1996. "The humiliation of the competition in the theater, the humiliation of poverty." The Lower East Side "was a nightmare—a dreadful, horrible, stinking nightmare," he recalled in an interview with The New York Times in 1971. After graduating from Seward Park High School, Matthau held government positions as a forester in Montana, a gym instructor for the Works Progress Administration, and a boxing coach for policemen. From Bombs to Broadway In 1942, Matthau enlisted in the United States Army Air Force as radio cryptographer in a heavy bomber unit of the U.S. Army Air Corps in Europe. He served as a radio operator and gunner in England, France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany and won six battle stars. He spent three years in the service.

After leaving the army, he took some journalism courses at Columbia University and studied acting on the G.I. Bill at New York's New School for Social Research. He met actor Tony Curtis when they studied acting together in the late 1940s. Work in summer stock led to small parts on Broadway and television shows. Matthau's first role on Broadway was as an understudy for the part of an 83-year-old English bishop in Anne of the Thousand Days. By 1948 Matthau played regularly on Broadway. He made his first film appearance in 1955 in The Kentuckian, as a villain. Through the rest of the 1950s, he played bad guys and drunks in a variety of modest movies, including the Elvis Presley movie King Creole (1958) and a Western, Ride a Crooked Trail (1958). Hello, Hollywood David Ansen described Matthau's physique in a Newsweek article. "He was a cross between W. C. Fields and a bloodhound, poured into a stooped, 6-foot-3 frame.

No Hollywood leading man has ever looked or sounded or shuffled like Walter Matthau: out of that craggy sourpuss face, with its seen-it-all eyes, came a growl of withering disdain that could stop any outburst of innocence in its tracks." Matthau had a serious gambling habit. In the 1950s, he owed several hundred thousand dollars in gambling debts. His luck changed in 1955 when he got a part in the hit Broadway show Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? He fell in love with a fellow cast member, actress Carol Marcus, the former wife of the writer William Saroyan. At the time, Matthau was married to Grace Johnson, whom he had wed in 1948 and with whom he had two children, David and Jenny. Matthau and Johnson divorced in 1958. He married Marcus in 1959, and the two had one son, Charlie. In her book Among the Porcupines Carol Matthau wrote of her husband, "To the outside world, he is casual, a man's man, funny, rude. … In actuality, he is the most passionate man I have ever known.

He is the most tender, the most romantic, the most sensual." Carol Matthau co-starred with her husband in Gangster Story (1960), which he directed and described as one of the worst movies ever made. He played a ship's doctor in Ensign Pulver (1964), a professor in Fail-Safe (1964), and a private detective in Mirage (1965). His part as the ambulance-chasing lawyer opposite his friend, actor Jack Lemmon, in The Fortune Cookie (1966) earned him his only Academy Award, for best supporting actor. Director Billie Wilder tailored the role of shyster lawyer "Whiplash Willie" for Matthau after seeing him play sportswriter slob Oscar Madison on Broadway in The Odd Couple. Matthau's true calling was comedy, although he disliked being labeled a comic actor. Describing his work habits, his wife noted, "I don't know of anyone who works that hard and yet seems never to work at all. He insists on maintaining his relaxed manner when he is working, in order to make the rest of the players feel more comfortable. That, too, is acting. It is not Walter.

Walter is not a relaxed man." Matthau recreated his Tony Award-winning Broadway role, which playwright Neil Simon created for him, in the movie version of The Odd Couple (1968). "Every actor looks all his life for a part that will combine his talents with his personality," Matthau said in an interview with Time in 1971. "The Odd Couple was mine. That was the plutonium I needed. It all started happening after that." In the 1970s, Matthau appeared in A New Leaf (1971), Pete 'n' Tillie (1972), and The Front Page (1974) and received Oscar nominations for Kotch (1971) and The Sunshine Boys (1975). Besides comedic roles, Matthau could successfully play a romantic leading man, a bank-robber hero, or even a horse trainer. Neil Simon praised him as "the greatest instinctive actor" he'd ever seen. Although he worked throughout the 1980s, his films from this period were not memorable. In May 1993, Matthau was honored with a Lifetime's Achievement Award by America's National Association of Theatre Owners.

The 1993 hit movie Grumpy Old Men (in which he starred once again with Lemmon) rejuvenated his career. Charlie Matthau, a filmmaker, directed his father in 1995's The Grass Harp. In his last film, Hanging Up, Matthau gave a powerful performance as a dying screenwriter. Charlie appeared in his father's last film as the younger version of his father's character. Matthau has appeared in a number of TV movies, including the Emmy-winning The Incident (1990) and Mrs. Lambert Remembers Love (1991), in which he was directed by his son. Matthau described his versatility as an actor in a 1994 interview with Karen Duffy for Interview. "I could play a cop, I could play a crook, I could play a lawyer, I could play a dentist, I could play an art critic—I could play the guy next door. I am the guy next door. I could play Catholic, Jewish, Protestant. As a matter of fact, when I did The Odd Couple, I would do it a different way each night.

On Monday I'd be Jewish, Tuesday Italian, Wednesday Irish-German—and I would mix them up. I did that to amuse myself, and it always worked." Describing how he did 20 takes of a scene in movie in which he had to cry, Matthau noted, "I wasn't thinking of the sadness, of my mother dying, of my child being run over by a car. I just did it! You gotta just do it, and it either comes or it doesn't. Because if you start thinking about it, it's too late." Matthau believed that his true talent was performing in theater, rather than in films. "That's where I was good—on the stage," he said in an interview in 1996. "In the movies … passable. But on the stage I could move with freedom and ease. And I had something: presence. On screen, all the power is in the hands of the director or the editor." Plagued by Ill Health Matthau suffered his first heart attack in 1966, which caused him to quit smoking. It occurred during the filming of The Fortune Cookie. Production of the film had to stop for three months while he recuperated.

Ten years later he underwent quadruple bypass surgery. He had cancer three times. He spent two weeks in the hospital with pneumonia in May 1999, but made a full recovery. Matthau refused to be depressed about his health. "Even just rolling by in a stretcher, he would say 'Hi!' to the person rolling by in the other direction," says Delia Ephron, in an article in People Weekly. "He was in the hospital on a respirator for 24 or 26 weeks, and who walks out of a hospital after that? But he did. You knew he just loved every minute of every day." Even with his poor health, Matthau did not intend to retire. In a 1995 interview with People Weekly he stated, "Some people retire and go fishing. If I retired, I'd go acting." Matthau died of a heart attack on July 1, 2000, at the age of 79. A Simple Burial "He wanted as little fuss made about it as possible, a simple burial in a plain pine casket," Charlie Matthau stated to an Associated Press reporter after his father's death.

About 50 family members and close friends attended the service, where Matthau was buried according to Jewish law. He was laid to rest at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles. Noted his wife, "It was impossible not to love him." Books Matthau, Carol, Among the Porcupines, Turtle Bay Books, 1992. Saroyan, Aram, Trio: Oona Chaplin, Carol Matthau, Gloria Vanderbilt. Portraits of an Intimate Friendship, Linden Press, 1985. Periodicals The Sunshine Boys, Starring Danny DeVito and Richard Griffiths, May Play Broadway | Playbill The Sunshine Boys, Starring Danny DeVito and Richard Griffiths, May Play Broadway By Andrew Gans , Mark Shenton Jul 24, 2012 The new West End production of Neil Simon's 1972 vaudeville comedy The Sunshine Boys, starring Danny DeVito and Richard Griffiths, may be headed to Broadway.

Danny DeVito and Richard Griffiths (Photo by Michael Birt) London producer Sonia Friedman told the New York Times that a Broadway run would not happen until at least later in the year because of co-star DeVito's shooting schedule for the FX series "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia." Sunshine Boys would mark the Broadway debut for screen star DeVito, who told the Times, "I wouldn't want to come to New York in something frivolous, just doing shtick. There’s a sadness in the relationship between these two men that really got to me, and I think it’d surprise American audiences who might have a certain expectation about a Neil Simon comedy — and about me." The Sunshine Boys officially opened May 17 at London's Savoy Theatre, following previews that began April 27, for a 12-week run through July 28. It is directed by Thea Sharrock, with designs by Hildegard Bechtler, lighting by Neil Austin, music by Adrian Johnston and sound by Ian Dickinson for Autograph. It is produced by Sonia Friedman Productions and Richard Willis. Also in the cast are Rebecca Blackstone, Nick Blakeley, Peter Cadden, Johnnie Fiori, Adam Levy and William Maxwell.

In the play, "kings of comedy, Willie Clark (DeVito) and Al Lewis (Griffiths), aka The Sunshine Boys, haven’t spoken to each other in years. When CBS call for the vaudevillian greats to be re-united for a nostalgic History of Comedy, past grudges resurface as they take centre stage once more. Ageing ailments aside, can this legendary double-act overcome their differences for one last show?" The Sunshine Boys was first produced on Broadway in 1972 and was later adapted for film and television. Sam Levene and Jack Albertson played Lewis and Clark in the stage premiere directed by Alan Arkin. Neil Simon's 1975 Academy Award-winning film adaptation starred George Burns as Lewis and Walter Matthau as Clark and was directed by Herbert Ross. Woody Allen and Peter Falk played the vaudevillian pair in the television version, directed by John Erman. To book tickets, contact the box office on 0844 871 7687, or visit for more details.

Today’s Most Popular News: Photo: First peek at Sunshine Boys Danny DeVito & Richard Griffiths - WhatsOnStage.com Photo: First peek at Sunshine Boys Danny DeVito & Richard Griffiths Andrew Girvan • West End • 19 Mar 2012 A first look at Hollywood star Danny DeVito and Richard Griffiths in Neil Simon 's comedy The Sunshine Boys has today (19 March 2012) been released by the show's producers. The comedy, which premiered on Broadway in 1972 and was adapted into a 1975 film starring George Burns and Walter Matthau, is directed by Thea Sharrock . The show follows Legally Blonde into the West End's Savoy Theatre, opening on 17 May 2012 (previews from 27 April 2012) and is booking for a strictly limited run until 28 July 2012 The Sunshine Boys focuses on Al Lewis (Griffiths) and Willy Clark (DeVito), a vaudevillian team who grew to hate each other and never spoke to each other off-stage during the final months of their 40-year act.

The pair are reunited for a television special on the history of comedy, with much of show's humour derived from efforts to get the two cantankerous actors into the same room for rehearsals. Joining DeVito and Griffiths as the ageing vaudevillian team are Rebecca Blackstone , Nick Blakeley , Peter Cadden , Johnnie Fiori , Adam Levy and William Maxwell . CLICK ON THE IMAGE BELOW TO ENLARGE Danny DeVito & Richard Griffiths in The Sunshine Boys. Photo credit: Michael Birt Richard Griffiths ' myriad stage credits include West End outings in Equus alongside Daniel Radcliffe and Heroes alongside John Hurt and Ken Stott , as well as recent National Theatre appearances in The Habit of Art and The History Boys. His recent screen roles include the Harry Potter franchise, the most recent instalment of the Pirates of the Caribbean films and the 2005 film adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Best known for his Hollywood film appearances, Danny DeVito starred in Off-Broadway productions such as The Comedy of Errors and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest in the early 1970s, going on to star in the Oscar-winning film adaptation.

On screen he won both a Golden Globe and an Emmy award for his portrayal of Louie De Palma in the hit US comedy Taxi, a role he played for five years. DeVito's extensive film credits include Terms of Endearment, Romancing the Stone, The Jewel of the Nile, Junior, Twins and Ruthless People. He also appeared as the Penguin opposite Michael Keaton’s Batman in Tim Burton ’s Batman Returns and will shortly voice the title character in the big screen adaptation of Dr Seuss' The Lorax before returning as Frank Reynolds in the eighth season It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia this autumn. As a director DeVito’s credits include Matilda, The War of the Roses and Hoffa. Neil Simon ’s career has spanned more than five decades as a playwright and screen writer. His first Broadway play, Come Blow Your Horn, opened in 1961. His second, Little Me, earned him his first Tony Award nomination and by 1966 Simon had four shows running on Broadway at the same time - Sweet Charity, The Star-Spangled Girl, The Odd Couple and Barefoot in the Park.

He has won three Tony Awards - Best Author for The Odd Couple, Best Play for Biloxi Blues and Best Play for Lost in Yonkers - and been nominated for 17. He also has also written the books for several musicals including Sweet Charity. The Sunshine Boys is designed by Hildegard Bechtler with lighting by Neil Austin and sound by Ian Dickinson for Autograph. Currently playing at the Savoy, Legally Blonde The Musical has announced it will close in the West End on Saturday 7 April 2012. The production, now in its third year in the West End, opened in December 2009 and went on to win seven major theatre awards including the Whatsonstage.com and Olivier Awards for Best Musical. X Danny DeVito and Richard Griffiths bring us The Sunshine Boys - Telegraph Theatre Features Danny DeVito and Richard Griffiths bring us The Sunshine Boys Danny DeVito and Richard Griffiths are about to hit the West End stage in Neil Simon’s play, The Sunshine Boys, about an old-time comedy double-act who can’t stand each other. It’s very funny – but also deadly serious, they tell David Gritten .

As a pair they call to mind the title of another famous Neil Simon play – 'The Odd Couple’: Danny DeVito and Richard Griffiths in The Sunshine Boys By David Gritten 8:42AM BST 27 Apr 2012 It’s a hot afternoon, and as I walk along a corridor next to a rehearsal room at the Jerwood Space, close to London’s South Bank, two of its internal windows are wide open – so it’s easy to hear the voices of two older men with New York accents bickering loudly at each other. This is excellent news: it means rehearsals for the new West End production of Neil Simon’s 1972 comedy The Sunshine Boys are proceeding as planned. The play is about two elderly vaudevillians called Lewis and Clark, who had a successful act for 43 years, but grew to dislike each other and split up when Lewis decided to retire. They are invited to reunite and do their act one more time for a television network special about the history of comedy – but can they stand to be in the same room?

American Danny DeVito, best known as the grouchy, malevolent Louie in the long-running television comedy Taxi, plays Willie Clark, while Britain’s Richard Griffiths, equally famed for playing the teacher Hector in The History Boys and Uncle Monty in the film Withnail and I, is Al Lewis. As soon as their rehearsal break is called, the two actors bound happily into a refreshment room to talk. One’s first thought is that as a pair they call to mind the title of another famous Neil Simon play – The Odd Couple. Although neither is exactly svelte, it is nevertheless hard to imagine a more sharply contrasting pair. DeVito, 67, is barely 5ft tall, with a tanned bald pate; he gesticulates wildly as he talks, fast and loud in staccato sentences. Griffiths, 64, is a bigger man in every way, and boasts an impressive mane of silver hair. He considers his words carefully, but makes them count. Related Articles Sequel talks for film Twins 30 Mar 2012 “We’ve been rehearsing two weeks, and it’s been a lot of fun,” says DeVito, beaming. “It’s a great play.

It’s a comedy, but it’s not frivolous at all. The first time Richard and I spoke about it on the phone, one thing we went right to was: this is not simply a comedy. It’s got a lot more depth to it, character-wise. “The other thing is getting to a point where we know the dialogue perfectly. Neil Simon is so precise.” Griffiths leans forward: “It kills him if you approximate.” In Britain, The Sunshine Boys is less well known as a stage play than as a film. A big-screen adaptation in 1975 starred Walter Matthau as Clark and George Burns as the irascible Lewis. Burns, who was 79 at the time, won an Oscar as supporting actor – the movie kick-started a late-flowering film career for him. But Griffiths is insistent that the version of Sunshine Boys he and DeVito will play is Simon’s original. “It’s the one in the Library of Congress,” he says seriously. “We talked to the director, Thea Sharrock, about it,” DeVito chips in. “She feels very particular about this.

We have fun with this play, but she’s pretty much a stickler for the words.” Neither actor has seen a stage production of The Sunshine Boys, though Griffiths clearly recalls the Matthau-Burns film, about which he has reservations: “Having been in a play which was then made into a film [The History Boys], I saw they’d done the same thing with The Sunshine Boys. They tried to 'open it up’ for the camera. There’s this desperate desire to open it up because they want to use more locations. But to do that, you have to insert new stuff. So the movie set itself up for a fall. It was unsatisfactory. They took the play and fiddled with it. “The performances are great – that’s not the problem. But we’re going back to the play, because it’s what Mr Simon wrote.” And what he wrote was hugely funny, though it’s sour humour, coming from characters who are getting older and are somewhat worn down by life. At one point Lewis tells Clark: “You know what your trouble is, Willy? You always took the jokes too seriously. It was just jokes. We did comedy on the stage for 43 years.

I don’t think you enjoyed it once.” Clark replies: “If I was there to enjoy it, I would buy a ticket.” “The way Neil Simon constructs the whole thing,” DeVito says, “he gives you all the humour, the absurdities, the craziness you expect, but he’s also giving you the glue between these characters, where the glue came apart and what happened to the relationship. “It’s like a marriage. There are so many things that can pile up, but the marriage is there – there’s a reason you got together. Al Lewis wouldn’t have stuck around as long as he did if he didn’t know it was working. Lewis and Clark did 8,000 shows around the circuit and nailed it every time. The audience was like, falling over. So there was something there. But they were with each other a lot and things deteriorated. It was little things, and finally they couldn’t be around each other.” Simon is widely thought to have used two real-life old-time American vaudeville acts as his models for Lewis and Clark. Their longevity was inspired by an act called Smith and Dale, who started their two-man act in 1920 and stayed together for 50 years.

Though they notoriously bickered with each other, they remained firm friends. The other precursors, Gallagher and Shean, worked together on and off for only a dozen or so years, and, although they were successful, their relationship was a stormy one. This happens a lot with partnerships in the entertainment industry. Pop groups go the same way: they spend long years on the road together and often fall out. “It’s the way the Beatles came apart,” Griffiths observes. “But everyone out there, the audience, just wanted them to be together, do the music and be happy.” And never to change, of course. “That’s right,” he says. “But change is inevitable. And I think this whole play is to do with the nature of change, because these two characters are confronted by choice at this point, at the fag-end of their careers.” But they agree that Simon’s play is partly about the ageing process and, as Griffiths says, “about the intractability of important relationships. It’s so complicated, this thing. Yet these two guys use very simple language. There’s nothing philosophical, tricksy, clever or smart-arse about them whatsoever. They’re comics, they’re stand-up guys.

That’s what they do.” DeVito and Griffiths will not be around long enough to tire of each other’s company: The Sunshine Boys is scheduled for a limited three-month run. But the two men, as different as chalk and cheese, seem to delight in each other and laugh a lot. They’ll be playing at the Savoy Theatre. “A gorgeous place,” says DeVito, before he starts lapsing into the querulous tones of Lewis and Clark: “But if I could, I’d like to appeal to the Mayor of London, or maybe the Prime Minister, and say: 'Is there a way to put a couple of lifts in there?’ I mean, would it have killed them to put an escalator in for two old guys like us? We gotta go up 50 steps to get to the stage. We got it in our contracts – one day he carries me up, the next day I carry him.” Of the two, DeVito, who grew up in New Jersey and comes from an Italian-American family, might seem to have the inside track on Lewis and Clark: his “Noo Joisey” accent fits right in for the rhythms of the dialogue Simon wrote for the two vaudevillians.

“But I’m so impressed with Richard’s accent,” he says. “It’s amazing.” Addressing Griffiths, he says: “Sometimes you say things that throw me right off. I hear my relatives sitting around a table talking.” He lapses into “Joisey”: “You doin’ a good job, Mr Griffiths, with that accent!” Griffiths, clearly touched by the compliment, actually blushes. “Well,” I tell DeVito, “he’s a national treasure, you know.” Not missing a beat, DeVito says: “Now he’s my treasure, too.” In fact, Griffiths admits he has not attempted an American accent since 1979, when he appeared in Trevor Nunn’s production of Kaufman and Hart’s Once in a Lifetime at the RSC. (He was nominated for an Olivier award on that occasion.) Still, it’s Griffiths who has a clear advantage in stage experience. While DeVito did a lot of theatre in New York in his younger days (off-Broadway he played Martini in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the film that gave him a major career break) he has essentially confined himself to movies and television since the Seventies.

“It’s been a while,” he admits. “But on Taxi, I played Louie for five years. And we’d do that show every Friday night in front of an audience of 300 people. Each time, we’d only had the script from Monday. We never did a straight run-through – one of us would screw up a line – but it wasn’t so different.” Both men insist that Al Lewis and Willie Clark are not mean-minded men, despite the acidity of their humour. “There’s a lot more love in our play than animosity,” DeVito muses. “You hear stories about big stars who berate assistants or do cruel things to a costume designer on set. I don’t think there’s cruelty in this.” “They’re not bullies, are they?” Griffiths murmurs. “No, they’re really sweet,” DeVito continues. “But they’re at that time in their life, in their seventies. You spend 43 years doing one thing, and then suddenly you’re either out to pasture or you’re unhappy about not working.

“We embody both of those results of life.” He assumes a voice of doom: “The ticking clock.” Then he cackles: “But it’s funny!” The Sunshine Boys opens at the Savoy Theatre, London, on April 27; 020 7492 9930 Old-git territory | The Spectator Old-git territory Email I’m not the biggest fan of Neil Simon, I admit it. In the programme notes for The Sunshine Boys, I discovered that Time magazine once called him ‘the patron saint of laughter’. Good, I thought. When the curtain goes up I’ve got someone to pray to. The show opens with Danny DeVito slumped in a hotel room watching TV in mid-afternoon. He’s a spent vaudeville star whose feud with his comedy partner forced him into retirement 11 years earlier. His nephew, a pushy young agent, wants to revive the famous duo for one last TV special. DeVito insists that he won’t do it.

(But he will, of course.) The corny script unfolds exactly as I remember it from the 1975 film, which I was dragged to at the age of 12, and which starred an overexcited Walter Matthau and a partially mummified George Burns. Some old git in my family thought these old gits would be a hoot. They weren’t. But now, as I close in on old-git territory myself, I begin to see the draw. I understand! The frothy, knockabout script disguises a subtle and moving meditation on ageing, on loss and on the curiously addictive nature of love-hate friendships. Simon’s writing isn’t quotable. It has few amphibious qualities. Extract a line from its native habitat and it expires on the spot. His great knack is to harmonise absurd humour with realism, and to create comedy and melancholy simultaneously. The closing scene shows the old foes reconciled (sort of), slumping in chairs, and exchanging funeral news and doctors’ notes about their advancing ailments. Your trouble is your blood doesn’t circulate, says one. It does, comes the response, but not to the right places. If that doesn’t make you laugh, you have no soul.

Or you’re 12 years old. This fast-lick production by Thea Sharrock is wonderfully dowdy. The main set is a 1970s hotel room that boasts no features from the 1970s. Spot-on. It hasn’t been decorated for 20 years. The lead is played by Danny DeVito who has a lot of presence for a man who could fit into a haversack. His comic persona — the pop-eyed, raspy-voiced Rumpelstiltskin — is filled out with layers of feeling and pathos. Beneath the bluster of a washed-up ego lurks a decent guy, a fragile, yearning, lonely old clown. Richard Griffiths, as his partner, gives a very muted, very generous second-fiddle performance. Never mind the weird American accent, Griffiths adds sombreness and a sort of majesty, too. Though not petite by any means, he moves around the stage with the distracted grace of an old elephant who’s missed the graveyard and is heading back to the watering-hole. Together the pair are exquisite. Tickets aren’t cheap but this is definitely a blue-chip buy.

At the Cottesloe we’re off to the suburbs for a comedy of manners by Lisa D’Amour, a Steppenwolf favourite and Pulitzer nominee. Two couples are having a barbie. Mary and Ben are solid, easily shockable types. Sharon and Kenny, both pretty flaky, are recovering addicts who met in rehab. All four are anxious, small-minded and desperate to impress. Result: a small-town scene that fizzes with comic embarrassment. Hilarious stuff. But the play has nowhere to go from here. The friendships get rowdier and zanier, but emptier at the same time, less credible, less engaging. The problem is this: real-life people visit the suburbs to socialise. Playwrights visit the suburbs to satirise. Real people want fun. Writers want vengeance. And this shifts our sympathy in the wrong direction. Rather than feeling contempt for these back-patio bumpkins I wanted to wrap a protective arm around them and tell Lisa D’Amour to get lost and pick on someone worthier of her sophisticated disdain. Still, a technically flawed play provides useful lessons for apprentice writers. Here, by my reckoning, are D’Amour’s biggest boobs.

Her stagecraft is repetitive. She concludes two scenes with the breaking of furniture and two more with a sudden foot injury. Her script has no interval, so the drama is missing that crucial day-night rhythm: the culmination, the pause and the reawakening. And she delivers a cop-out ending with a messenger walking on to reveal that Someone Was Pretending To Be Someone They Weren’t. Strong performances can’t save this callow show. Justine Mitchell crackles with energy as Mary, the slightly hysterical ditz. Clare Dunne is equally powerful as Sharon, the slightly less hysterical ditz. Stuart McQuarrie neatly captures Ben, the businessman with a shameful secret. And Will Adamsdale is excellent as Kenny, the warehouseman with a shameful secret. Er, right. I’ve just spotted another boob. The characters are a bit interchangeable. Forget Detroit. Save up for The Sunshine Boys. Subscribe to The Spectator today for a quality of argument not found in any other publication. Get more Spectator for less – just £12 for 12 issues . You might also like

Question: George Burns and Walter Matthau starred in which 1975 film about two ageing vaudevillains?
Answer: The Sunshine Boys