MATTHAU, Walter

(b. 1 October 1920 in New York City; d. 1 July 2000 in Santa Monica, California), comic character actor best known for playing grumpy old men in such movies as The Odd Couple (1966) and The Fortune Cookie (1967), playing alongside Jack Lemmon.

Matthau, who is listed in some sources with the surname Matthow or Matuschanskayasky, was the son of Jewish Russian immigrants. His father, Milton, was a street peddler in New York City, and his mother, Rose Berolsky, was a garment worker. After his father left the family, from the age of three Matthau lived with his mother and older brother Henry in a Ukrainian ghetto on New York's Lower East Side. He began acting at age eleven at the New York Yiddish Theater and also became a proficient boxer. After graduating from Seward Park High School he served in the Army Air Corps during World War II, receiving six battle stars, and then attended the New School's Dramatic Workshop on the GI Bill. He studied under Erwin Piscator, alongside Tony Curtis and Rod Steiger. Matthau was well known for misleading interviewers. He was fond of explaining that his father was a defrocked Russian Orthodox priest, while Matthau apparently invented the elaborate surname Matuschanskayasky in revenge for having been given more work than expected on the 1974 disaster movie Earthquake.

Matthau's acting career began with a part in an off-Broadway production of The Aristocrats in 1946 and continued when he was the understudy for the role of an octogenarian bishop in Anne of a Thousand Days on Broadway in 1948. He married Grace Johnson in 1948, and they had two children, but the couple divorced in 1958. In 1959 Matthau married Carol Marcus Saroyan, with whom he had a son, Charles, who is a film director. Matthau made his screen debut in The Kentuckian (1955) and by the late 1950s was combining regular stage appearances with minor character roles in movies. In particular he gave picture-stealing performances as villains in Westerns such as Ride a Crooked Trail (1958) and Lonely Are the Brave (1962). With his sagging, bloodhound face, Matthau always struggled to win leading roles on the stage or in movies, but by the 1960s he was an established Hollywood character actor. By 1965 he had appeared in more than twenty movies, 150 television shows, and twenty Broadway plays. Even so, he was in his late thirties before his name and his face became well known.

Interviewed in 1971, Matthau said, "Every actor looks for a part that will combine his talents with his personality." Disheveled sportswriter Oscar Madison was the part that did this for him. He first took the role in Neil Simon's play The Odd Couple on Broadway in 1965, winning a Tony Award for best actor and a New York Drama Critics' Award. The following year Matthau teamed up with Jack Lemmon for the first time in Billy Wilder's The Fortune Cookie (1966), and the pair began an on-screen double act that became one of the most successful in movie history. After the success of the stage version of The Odd Couple, The Fortune Cookie was something of a return to Matthau's movie origins, in which he often played crooked lawyers. But this time, as an attorney who persuades his brother-in-law to fake a sports injury to win damages in a lawsuit, Matthau found himself alongside an actor who complimented his deadpan comic delivery to perfection. Reviews of the film were mixed, but Matthau won an Academy Award for best supporting actor, and the obvious chemistry between the two male leads made a repeat performance inevitable. He was nominated for Oscars twice more, for Kotch (1971), directed by Lemmon, and The Sunshine Boys (1975), in which he starred with George Burns.

The Matthau-Lemmon partnership surfaced for the second time in 1968, in the form of the movie version of The Odd Couple, probably Matthau's best-known film appearance. Reprising his part as Oscar Madison, Matthau slouches around the apartment he has agreed to share with his newly separated friend Felix Ungar, played by Lemmon. In the 1960s, as divorce rates rose, The Odd Couple provided sharp comic commentary on an increasingly common temporary domestic arrangement. As the plot progresses Oscar and Felix begin to argue incessantly about their living arrangements. Oscar is a disorganized slob, while Felix is excessively clean and tidy. At one point Oscar complains that Felix keeps leaving him reminder notes such as "We are all out of cornflakes, F.U." He explains, "It took me three hours to figure out that F.U. was Felix Ungar." While Oscar and Felix squabbled on screen, Matthau and Lemmon became close friends. After Matthau's death in 2000, Lemmon said, "I have lost someone I loved as a brother, a closest friend, and a remarkable human being. We have also lost one of the best damn actors we'll ever see."

In the 1960s Matthau and Lemmon formed one of the most enduring screen partnerships in movie history. They worked together many times between 1966 and Matthau's death in 2000, often revisiting their Odd Couple characters in all but name. Best known for playing irascible, obstinate slobs, Matthau was in fact a versatile actor, as appearances in Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe (1964) and Edward Dmytryk's Mirage (1965) show. In Plaza Suite (1971) he convincingly played multiple characters.

A heavy smoker and gambler, Matthau suffered his first major heart attack in 1966, while making The Fortune Cookie, and estimated that he had gambled away over $5 million during his lifetime. Though generally good-humored, he was inclined to tell tall tales and to make life difficult for anyone he disliked. One of his favorite jokes was to speak to movie executives only in Yiddish. After appearing in over seventy films in his forty-five-year career, Matthau died at the Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California, following a heart attack. He is buried at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles.

A full-length biography of Matthau is Allan Hunter, Walter Matthau (1984). Carol Matthau is candid about her life with Matthau in her book Among the Porcupines: A Memoir (1993). Allen Eyles, "Walter Matthau," Focus on Film (spring 1972) is also useful. Among the best interviews with Matthau is Karen Duffy, "Genius," Interview (1 Dec. 1994). Obituaries are in the Times (London) (3 July 2000) and Time (10 July 2000).

Chris Routledge