Walter matthau

Walter Matthau ( /ˈmæθaʊ/; born Walter John Matthow, Lower East Side, New York, May 1 October 1920-Santa Monica, California, July 1, 2000) was an American actor of Russian-Lithuanian Jewish origin, winner of the Oscars and Globe of O ro He won the Oscar for best supporting actor in 1966 for his role in The Fortune Cookie ( On a silver platter ). He and Jack Lemmon formed one of the most memorable comedic pairings in history. They collaborated on ten films together, including Gene Saks' The Odd Couple (The Odd Couple, 1968) and The Front Page. (Front page, 1974), by Billy Wilder. Continuing his comedic roles, he played other highly successful roles in Cactus Flower (Cactus Flower, 1969), Hello, Dolly!, The Crazy Couple, by Herbert Ross and Pirates, by Roman Polański.

Biography

Early Years

Walter John Matthow was born on October 1, 1920 on the Lower East Side of New York. He was the son of Milton Matthow, an electrician (from Russia) who left the family when he was three, and Rose Berolsky (from Lithuania), a candy store clerk, both Jewish immigrants. As he did throughout his life in People never knew if he was serious or joking, Matthau created the rumor that his middle name was Foghorn, because he was the son of a Lithuanian Orthodox priest, and that his original name was Foghorn. Matuschanskayasky (credited with a cameo in the film Earthquake).

As a child, Matthau attended a non-profit Jewish camp, Tranquility Camp, where he began performing in the camp's Saturday night shows. He worked for a short time as a cashier at a food stand in the Yiddish Theater District.

During World War II, Matthau saw active duty as a radio operator in the United Kingdom-based Eighth Air Force aboard a Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber. He was in the same operating group as James Stewart. While at Norfolk's RAF Old Buckenham, he flew missions over continental Europe during the Battle of the Bulge. He finished the war with the rank of sergeant and returned to the United States to try to continue his acting career.

Early career

Matthau in 1952

While studying journalism at Columbia University, Matthau took classes in a dramatic workshop at The New School with German director Erwin Piscator. His first Broadway job was in 1949 as an understudy for an eighty-year-old English bishop in Anne of a Thousand Days. He has often been asked that his best reviews came in a play in the one who posed as a bum. One reviewer said: "The others looked like actors in make-up, Walter Matthau really does look like a bum!" Matthau was a respected stage actor for years in such works as Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and A Shot in the Dark , for which he won the 1962 Tony Award for best Actor.

Matthau appeared in the pilot for Mister Peepers (1952) with Wally Cox. For unknown reasons, he took the name Leonard Elliot. He played a gym teacher named Mr. Wall. Around that time, he became a television regular on shows like The Philco Television Playhouse, Motorola TV Theatre, Goodyear Television Playhouse, The Alcoa Hour and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and in series such as Naked City, Route 66 or Insight.

In 1955, Billy Wilder was about to give him the alternative in the world of cinema by casting him as Richard Sherman in Temptation Lives Above but the executives of 20th Century-Fox were not convinced of giving such an important role to a rookie. Ultimately, this role went to Tom Ewell, who had already starred in this role on Broadway.

Finally, it was Burt Lancaster who gave him the opportunity in the cinema in a film of his authorship The Kentuckian Man (The Kentuckian). Shortly after, would come Ride a Crooked Trail with Audie Murphy, and Onionhead (all 1958) starring Andy Griffith. One of his biggest roles at this time was in the drama A Face in the Crowd (1957), directed by Elia Kazan and with James Mason in Mightier than Bigger Than Life (1956) directed by Nicholas Ray. Later he would play the villain in King Creole (1958), a film to show off Elvis Presley.

The 1960s began with a low-budget project directed by and starring himself The Gangster Story (1960) and played a a sympathetic sheriff in Lonely Are the Brave (1962), starring Kirk Douglas and he accompanied Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in Charade (Charade) (1963).

His appearances on television also followed, including two episodes on the series Naked City, four shorts for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and the episode A Tumble from a Tall White House from The Eleventh Hour (1963). He also appeared eight times on The DuPont Show of the Week between 1962 and 1964 and played the role of Franklin Gaer in an episode of Dr. Kildare and in one season on Tallahassee 7000 (1961–62).

Your stage of success begins

Matthau and Art Carney in the play The strange couple1965

Comedies were a style that Matthau played little at the time. He had specialized in dramas, such as Fail Safe (1964), in which he played Pentagon adviser Dr. Groeteschele, who urges an all-out nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in response to to an accidental transmission of an attack signal to US Air Force bombers. Theater director Neil Simon would cast him in the play The Odd Couple in 1965, in which Matthau would play sportswriter Oscar Madison, while Art Carney played Felix Ungar. Matthau would reprise the same role in the film version, alongside Jack Lemmon three years later. Simon would later recall:

Every night The strange couple in a different way. Monday was as if he were Jewish; Tuesday, Italian; Wednesday, German-Irish... and he also mixed them all. I did it for fun, and it always worked. "

On the other hand, Matthau comments on his role in this play:

"Every actor spends his life waiting for the role that combines his talent and personality. The strange couple It was mine. It was the plutonium I needed. That's where it started for me."

That year he would play Ted Casselle in the thriller Mirage (Mirage) (1965), by Edward Dmytryk. In the second part of the 1960s, his greatest hits came, which were comedies. The first of these was the feature film On a Silver Platter (The Fortune Cookie) (1966), which would be the first of multiple collaborations with both director Billy Wilder and his co-star Jack Lemmon, This role gave him the Oscar for best supporting actor. Filming was postponed for five months due to a severe heart attack, caused by his habit of smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. Matthau appeared at the Oscars with injuries and his arm in a cumbersome cast and explained in the speech who had been injured in a bicycle accident. However, he allowed himself the luxury of scolding the actors who did not attend the ceremony, especially the other major award winners of the night: Paul Scofield, Elizabeth Taylor and Sandy Dennis. On the other hand, the filming served to set the friendship between Wilder and the two actors. In fact, the director confesses that he saw Matthau a couple of times a week and Lemmon also usually attended.

Matthau and Barbra Streisand in a frame Hello, Dolly! in 1969

The successes continued until the late 1960s. After starring in Gene Kelly's A Guide for the Married Man in 1967, he would succeed again with the film version from The Odd Couple with Lemmon and directed by Gene Saks. For this role she was paid $300,000, ten times what she was paid a decade earlier.

In 1969, he would close with two more blockbusters: Cactus Flower and Hello Dolly!. During the filming of the latter, he had so many confrontations with Barbra Streisand that he even refused to be with her on the set unless the script forced him to. He is assigned the sentence in which she describes Streisand as a person who has "no more talent than a butterfly fart". Curiously, he could be seen without problems years later in the audience of the One Voice (1986) concerts at the actress's Malibu ranch, where guests who had previously paid $5,000 per couple to help the Streisand Foundation were able to attend.

The 70s: actor by any register

The early '70s returned with another Oscar nomination for Kotch (1971), directed by Lemmon. In those years, the actor established himself as a valid actor in any registry. This is how his interpretive solvency could be seen when he interpreted three different characters in Plaza Suite from 1971, the dissatisfied husband in the melodrana Laughter and tears (Pete 'n' Tillie) (1972), as a detective investigating a mass crime on a bus in San Francisco, Naked City (The Laughing Policeman) (1973), as a bank robber on the run from the law and of the Mafia in The Big Swindle (Charley Varrick) (also in 1973) and the traffic officer who is involved in a tube bombing in Pelham 1, 2, 3 (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three) (1974).

In the second half, he made a successful return to comedies, most notably The Sunshine Boys (1975), where he earned another Oscar nomination and for which he won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy Actor and the reunion with Lemmon and Wilder in Front Page in 1974. Another box office success was the comedy in which he plays a coach who becomes charge of a baseball team of misfits Los picarones (The Bad News Bears) (1976). By the end of the decade, he would appear in the extensive cast of California Suite in 1978.

The 80s: Way of the Supporting Actor

Charles and Walter Matthau

Matthau tried to produce a few films for Universal Pictures with his son Charlie, who created Walcar Productions, but only produced one film: the third remake of Little Miss Marker (1980). He was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy for his portrayal of CIA agent Miles Kendig in the spy comedy Hopscotch (1980), along with Glenda Jackson. The original script, a drama based on the novel Hopscotch, was rewritten and turned into a comedy to suit Matthau's abilities. The rewrite was a condition for the actor to participate. Matthau was involved in revising the script and, according to director Ronald Neame, said that Matthau's contributions entitled him to be credited on the script but the actor never pursued that. wrote the scene where Kendig and Isobel meet in a Salzburg restaurant and start a conversation over wine that ends in a passionate kiss. He is also the author of the last scene of the film, where Kendig, presumed dead, disguises himself as a Sikh to enter a bookstore, all seasoned. He also helped choose the appropriate Mozart compositions that made up much of the score.TCM reviewer Susan Doll notes that ''Hopscotch'' is not the only thing to do. could be considered the end of a long professional career or the beginning of a (Matthau's) downhill slide, depending on your point of view', as character parts and supporting parts became the only thing available to a actor of his age...

The following year, he was again nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy for his portrayal of attorney Daniel Snow in First Monday in October (1981). The film was about the first (fictional) 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 appointed Sandra Day O'Connor in July 1981, the release date was moved to August 1981. That same year, the third and final film would be released. Wilder-Lemmon-Matthau collaboration with A friend here with little success. In 1982, Matthau played Herbert Tucker in I'm your daughter, do you remember? (I Ought to Be in Pictures) (1982), with Ann-Margret and Dinah Manoff. And in 1986, Matthau gave one of his last great performances as the lead as Captain Thomas Bartholomew Red in Roman Polanski's version of Pirates.

Last years

Walter Matthau in the '90s.

In the 1990s, its activity continued to be very intense. He was one of the huge cast of stars in Oliver Stone's political drama, JFK (1991). Although many scenes were recorded, the final montage only left him in two. Later, he would be the narrator voice of the animated film How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1992), the role of Mr. Wilson in Dennis the Menace (Dennis the Menace) (1993) and that of Albert Einstein himself in the romantic comedy The Genius of Love (I.Q.) (1994), starring Tim Robbins and Meg Ryan.

On the other hand, comedies with his partner Jack Lemmon were common, becoming one of the longest-running in Hollywood. In the 1990s, they returned with three more comedies: Grumpy Old Men (1993), alongside Ann-Margret and its sequel, Grumpy Old Men. (1995), together with Sophia Loren. Two years later, they would once again embark on other projects together with Por rumbas y a lo loco (Out to Sea) (1997) and the sequel to The crazy couple The odd couple, again (The Odd Couple II) (1998).

Hanging Up (2000), directed by Diane Keaton, would be her last screen appearance.

Matthau Tomb

Matthau had coronary problems during the last years of his life. On the afternoon of June 30, 2000, he suffered a heart attack at home and was taken by ambulance to St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica where he died a few hours later at the age of 79. He was buried in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, very close to the graves of his friends Jack Lemmon (who died almost exactly a year later) and Billy Wilder. Her wife Carol Marcus would die in 2003 and was buried in the same grave as her husband's.

Personal life

Marriages

He was married twice; first with Grace Geraldine Johnson from 1948 to 1958 and then with actress Carol Marcus, also known as Carol Grace and formerly married to writer William Saroyan, from 1959 until his death in 2000. With his first wife he had two children, Jenny and David, and a son, Charlie Matthau, with the second.

Health problems

A chain smoker, Matthau had a heart attack in 1966 while filming On a Silver Platter, the first of three he would suffer.

In 1976, ten years after his first attack, he underwent heart bypass surgery. After working in Minnesota on Grumpy Old Men (1993), he was hospitalized with double pneumonia. In December 1995, he underwent an operation for a colon tumor, apparently successful, although there is no mention of cancer on his death certificate. He was hospitalized in May 1999 for two months, re-admitted for pneumonia.

He also had stomach problems from his stomach binges. He once said:

"If you eat only celery and lettuce, you won't get bad. I like celery and lettuce, but I like it with sausages, canned meat, potatoes, peas. And I like cakes, vanilla ice cream with chocolate cover."

Gambling addiction

Throughout his life, Matthau had many gambling problems. He once estimated that he had lost about $5 million in gambling during his lifetime, which he tried to recoup with percentages of box office profits.

Complete filmography

Promotional cartel The strange couple

Awards and distinctions

Oscar Awards

BAFTA Awards

Golden Globe Awards

He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame located at 6357 Hollywood Blvd.