Walter Matthau was an American actor and comedian.
Background
Matthau, Walter was born on October 1, 1920 in New York City. He was the son of a Russian Orthodox priest who came to America. Deserted by the father, while his mother worked, Matthau was brought up by the Daughters of Israel Day Nursery and must have absorbed timing with his vitamin C.
Education
He served in the air force during the war and afterwards studied at the New School for Social Research Dramatic Workshop.
Career
He made his Broadway debut in 1948 and has been a leading comedy actor ever since, favoring the theatre and clearly liking “East Coast ” projects.
He made his film debut in The Kentuckian (55, Burt Lancaster), and for a few years he was cast as a villain or a pipe-smoking friend (in Strangers When We Meet, the one turned into the other): The Indian Fighter (55, André de Toth); Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (57, Arnold Laven); A Face in the Crowd (57, Elia Kazan); King Creole (58, Michael Curtiz); Strangers When We Meet (60, Richard Quine); Lonely Are the Brave (62, David Miller); Charade (63, Stanley Donen); Fail-Safe (63, Sidney Lumet); and Mirage (65, Edward Dmytrvk). He was always watchable, but there was no doubt that he was being wasted.
It was a great Broadway success in Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple that pushed him into major film parts. As a preliminary, he was excellent as a Korda-type mogul in Goodbye Charlie (64, Vincente Minnelli). But his most characteristic work is in The Odd Couple (67. Gene Saks); The Fortune Cookie (66, Billy Wilder); The Secret Life of an American Wife (68, George Axelrod); Cactus Flower (69, Saks); Plaza Suite (70, Arthur Hiller); A New Leaf (70, Elaine May); Kotch (71, Jack Lemmon); Pete ’n’ Tillie (72, Martin Ritt); The Laughing Policeman (73, Stuart Rosenberg); The Front Page (74, Wilder); and The Taking of Pelham 123 (74, Joseph Sargent).
He is a great technician, in terms of movement, response, wisecrack, and exaggerated alarm, even though his sourness usually derides phoniness and self-deception. As a result, it is not easy to gauge Matthau’s own nature, for he is fixed in the idiom of smart self-derision and always offers the brilliant spectacle of disguise mocking the need for disguise. The skill of his playing sometimes tends to dispel his assumed misanthropy. And if none of his films is without flaw, that may be because of a final reluctance on Matthaus part to reveal himself. So schooled to the wisecrack, he may be unable to talk straight. His immense facility, like that of Jack Lemmon, too often seems mannered and wearisome. And when the two are together the film is a hothouse of cold-blooded comic neurosis. His humor seemed closer to character when drafted into the thriller genre of Charley Varrick (73, Don Siegel), but in 1974, he mugged dreadfully under the name “Matuschanskayasky” as a drunk in Earthquake (Mark Hobson).
In 1961, he acted in and directed Gangster Story but seems never to have been tempted that way again.
He played with George Burns in The Sunshine Boys (75, Herbert Ross); with Tatum O’Neal in The Bad News Bears (76, Michael Ritchie); with horses in Casey's Shadow (78, Martin Ritt); with Glenda Jackson in House Calls (78, Howard Zieff); with Elaine May in California Suite (78, Ross).
There’s something sad in that Matthau’s occasional appearances on talk shows—poker-faced a collection of anecdotes and disguises—were invariably more interesting than his pictures: Hopscotch (80, Ronald Neame); Little Miss Marker (80, Walter Bernstein); Buddy Buddy (81, Wilder); First Monday in October (81, Neame)—as a Supreme Court justice; I Ought to Be in Pictures (82, Ross); The Survivors (83, Ritchie); Movers and Shakers (85, William Asher); Pirates (86, Roman Polanski), in a role once meant for Jack Nicholson; The Couch Trip (88, Ritchie); making his TV movie debut as a lawyer in The Incident (90, Joseph Sargent) who defends a German prisoner of war on a murder charge; as Senator Russell Long in JFK (91, Oliver Stone); and Grumpy Old Men (93, Daniel Petrie).
In his final years, Matthau was pretty shameless, and very broad, with the grumpy old guy: Dennis the Menace (93, Nick Castle); Incident in a Small Town (94, Delbert Mann); as Einstein in I.Q. (94, Fred Schepisi); The Grass Harp (95, Charles Matthau—his son); Grumpier Old Men (95, Howard Deutch); I'm Not Rappapoii (96, Herb Gardner); Out to Sea (97, Martha Coolidge); The Odd Couple II (98, Deutch); The Marriage Fool (98, Matthau); and father to the girls in Hanging Up (00, Diane Keaton).