Walter John Matthau (October 1, 1920 – July 1,
2000) was an American
actor best known for his
role as
Oscar Madison in
The Odd Couple and his frequent
collaborations with
Odd Couple star
Jack Lemmon, as well as his role as Coach
Buttermaker in the 1976 comedy
The Bad News Bears. He won an
Academy Award for his performance in
the
Billy Wilder film
The Fortune Cookie.
Early life
Matthau
was born in New York
City
's Lower East
Side
on October 1, 1920, the son of Jewish immigrants Rose (née Berolsky), who was born in
Lithuania
and worked in a sweatshop, and Milton (Melos)
Matthau, an electrician and peddler who was
from Russia
. His
original surname is often shown as Matuschanskayasky, but this is
not true (see
Matuschanskayasky below for
a detailed discussion). As a young boy, Walter attended a Jewish
non-profit sleepaway camp, Tranquillity Camp, where he first began
acting in the shows the camp would stage on Saturday nights. He
also attended Surprise Lake Camp.
Career
During
World War II, Matthau served in
the
U.S. Army Air Forces with the Eighth Air Force in England
as a
B-24 Liberator radioman-gunner, in
the same 453rd Bombardment
Group as James
Stewart. He reached the rank of
staff sergeant and became interested in
acting. He took classes in acting at the Dramatic Workshop of
The New School in New York with the
influential 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. He won the 1962
Tony
Award for Best Featured Actor in a play.
In 1952, Matthau appeared in the pilot of
Mr. Peepers with
Wally
Cox. For reasons unknown he used the name Leonard Elliot. His
role was of the gym teacher Mr. Wall. In 1955, he made his
motion picture debut as a whip-wielding bad guy in
The Kentuckian opposite
Burt Lancaster.
Matthau appeared as a villain in many subsequent movies, such as
1958's
King Creole (in which he
is beaten up by
Elvis Presley). That
same year, he made a
western called
Ride a Crooked Trail
with
Audie Murphy and the notorious
flop
Onionhead starring
Andy Griffith and
Erin O'Brien. He had a featured role
opposite Griffith in the acclaimed drama
A Face in the Crowd, directed by
Elia Kazan. Matthau also directed a
low-budget 1960 movie called
The Gangster Story.
In 1962, he won acclaim as a sympathetic sheriff in
Lonely are the Brave, which
starred
Kirk Douglas. He played a
government agent with a secret in the popular mystery
Charade, co-starring
Cary
Grant and
Audrey Hepburn.
Appearances on
television were common
too, including two on
ABC's police drama
Naked City and in the 1963
episode "A Tumble from a Tall White House" of the
NBC medical drama about
psychiatry,
The Eleventh Hour.
He appeared eight times between 1962 and 1964 on
The DuPont
Show of the Week and as Franklin Gaer in 1964 in the episode
"Man Is a Rock" on the medical drama
Dr.
Kildare.
Matthau made many appearances in live TV plays. Although he was
constantly working, the fact that he was not handsome in a
traditional sense confined him at first to supporting roles.
Comedies also were rare in Matthau's work at that time. He was cast
in a number of stark dramas, such as 1964's
Fail-Safe, in which he portrayed a White
House adviser during a catastrophic global incident.
In 1965, however, a plum comedy role came Matthau's way when
Neil Simon cast him in the hit
play The Odd
Couple playing the slovenly sportswriter Oscar Madison
opposite
Art Carney as his fussy roommate
Felix Unger. Matthau would later join Jack Lemmon in the movie
version.
He achieved a great film success in a 1966 comedy as a shyster
lawyer called "Whiplash Willie" Gingrich starring opposite Lemmon
in
The Fortune Cookie,
the first of what would be 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
suffered a
heart attack.
Matthau was visibly banged up during the awards show, having been
involved in a bicycle accident. He scolded nominated actors who
were perfectly healthy but had not bothered to come to the
ceremony, especially three of the other four major award winners:
Elizabeth Taylor,
Sandy Dennis and
Paul
Scofield.
Oscar nominations would come Matthau's way again for 1972's
Kotch, directed by Lemmon, and 1975's
The Sunshine Boys,
another Simon vehicle transferred from the stage, this one about a
pair of former
vaudeville stars. For the
latter role he won a
Golden Globe award
for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy.
Broadway hits turned into films continued to cast Matthau in the
leads with 1969's
Hello,
Dolly! and that same year's
Cactus Flower, for which co-star
Goldie Hawn received an Oscar. He played three
different roles in the 1971 film version of Simon's
Plaza Suite and would be in the cast of its
followup
California Suite
in 1978.
Matthau starred in three crime dramas in the mid-'70s, as a
detective investigating a mass murder on a bus in
The Laughing Policeman, as a
bank robber on the run from the Mafia and the law in
Charley Varrick and as a New York
transit cop in the action-adventure
The Taking of Pelham One Two
Three.
A change of pace about misfits on a
Little
League baseball team turned out to be a solid hit in 1976 when
Matthau starred as coach Morris Buttermaker in the comedy
Bad News Bears.
His partnership with Lemmon became one of the most successful
pairings 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. Aside from their many comedies, each appeared (though
not on screen together) in the 1991
Oliver
Stone drama about the presidential assassination,
JFK.
They had a surprise box-office hit in the comedy
Grumpy Old Men, reuniting for a sequel,
Grumpier Old Men, that
co-starred
Sophia Loren and
Ann-Margret. That led to more pairings late in
their careers, notably
Out to
Sea and a Simon-scripted sequel to one of their great
successes,
The Odd Couple
II.
Hanging Up, a 2000 film directed
by and starring
Diane Keaton, turned
out to be Matthau's final appearance on screen.
Personal life
Matuschanskayasky
There is a persistent rumor that his
birth
name was Matuschanskayasky, which is false, as are the rumors
that his name was Matashansky or Matansky, or any of the other
reported names. In truth, as reported by the authors of
Matthau: A Life by Rob Edelman and Audrey Kupferberg
(along with Walter's son, Charlie Matthau), Walter was a teller of
tall tales. In his youth, he found that the joy of embellishment
lifted a story (and the listener) to such enjoyable heights that he
could not resist trying to pass off the most bogus of information,
just to see who was gullible enough to believe it. Matthau told
many stories to many reputable people, including the
Social Security
Administration. When he registered for a number, he was amazed
that they only wanted him to write his name, and offer no proof of
his identity. So, as another of his traditional goofs, he wrote
that his true name was "Walter Foghorn Matthau."
The "Matuschanskayasky" name rumor culminated with the release of
1974's
Earthquake. The executive producer,
Jennings Lang, had worked with Matthau
the previous year on the film
Charley Varrick, and persuaded him to
take a cameo role in
Earthquake – the small part scripted
only as a "drunk at the end of the bar." On a whim, Matthau agreed
to take the part, without compensation, on the condition that he
not be credited under his real name. After Matthau agreed, the part
of the "drunk" was expanded to provide comic relief for the film,
the character offering toasts to various people (
Spiro Agnew,
Bobby
Riggs, and
Peter Fonda), as well as
delivering the punchline "Hey, who do you have to know to get a
drink around here?" in the midst of a bar devastated by a major
earthquake. As requested, when it came time to insert the credits
for
Earthquake, the long name "Matuschanskayasky" was
used, as agreed, by Jennings Lang and Matthau.
Despite the facts, this fake name continued to appear in the
World Almanac section on
"Original Names of Selected Entertainers" as recently as the 2009
edition (p. 278).
Marriages
Matthau was married twice; first to Grace Geraldine Johnson (1948 –
1958), and from 1959 until his death in 2000 to
Carol Marcus.
He had two children, Jenny Matthau and David Matthau (now a radio news
reporter for WKXW "New Jersey
101.5
" in Trenton NJ) , with his first wife, and a son,
Charlie Matthau, with his second. He
also helped raise Carol's children
Aram
Saroyan and
Lucy Saroyan. His
grandchildren include
William
Matthau and
Emily Roman. His son,
Charlie, directed Matthau in the movie
The Grass Harp (1995).
Death
Matthau
died of full cardiac arrest in
Santa
Monica
, California
, on July 1, 2000. He was 79 years old. After
undergoing heart surgery in
1985, doctors
discovered that he had
colon cancer
which, by the time of his death, had spread to his
liver,
lungs, and
brain. However, on his death certificate the causes of
death are listed as
cardiac arrest
and
atherosclerotic heart disease,
with
ESRD and
atrial fibrillation added as "other
significant conditions contributing to death but not related to
[primary] cause..."
He is interred in the Westwood
Village Memorial Park Cemetery
in Los
Angeles
.
Just under one year later, Jack Lemmon was buried at the cemetery
next to his friend after dying from colon cancer and bladder
cancer. After Matthau's death, Lemmon as well as other friends and
relatives appeared on
Larry King
Live in an hour of tribute and remembrance; many of those same
people appeared on the show one year later, reminiscing about
Lemmon.
His widow, Carol, died of a
brain
aneurysm in 2003 and was buried next to him.
Work
Filmography
Stage
Television
Further reading
References
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