Curmudgeonly Actor Walter Matthau

Famed For `Odd Couple' Role

July 02, 2000|By Michael Wilmington, Tribune Movie Critic.

Walter Matthau, 79, the sour-faced, hilariously smart-aleck actor who became one of the great character stars of American movies, died Saturday morning of a heart attack in Santa Monica, Calif.

Mr. Matthau was unique, a consummate performer who parlayed his large talent and decidedly non-movie star looks into a career that only death could derail. Though stricken with illnesses in the past few years, he retained his star power and kept working.

Just this year, he appeared, brilliantly, as Meg Ryan's crotchety dying father in director Diane Keaton's "Hanging Up." His last movie with his lifelong best friend, Jack Lemmon, was 1998's "The Odd Couple II."

In that picture, Mr. Matthau reprised, after three decades, the role that made his career: wise-cracking, slovenly New York sportswriter Oscar Madison, who is forced to room with his emotionally opposite friend, finicky photographer Felix Unger, played by Lemmon in the 1968 movie.

"Every actor looks all his life for a part that will combine his talents with his personality," Mr. Matthau said in a 1971 Time magazine interview. "`The Odd Couple' was mine."

It was a play and part written for Mr. Matthau by playwright Neil Simon, and so close to Mr. Matthau's real-life personality that the actor initially balked, asking whether he could instead play fussbudget Felix. Later, he suggested swapping parts with Art Carney, Broadway's Felix.

Oscar remained his role, however. And it was shortly after the stage version of "The Odd Couple" in 1965 that Mr. Matthau won a supporting actor Oscar for his part as wry, unscrupulous ambulance-chasing lawyer "Whiplash" Willie Gingrich in Billy Wilder's 1966 classic, "The Fortune Cookie."

In that film, Mr. Matthau for the first time acted opposite Lemmon, who was the movie's straight man and Gingrich's patsy: hapless pro football cameraman Harry Hinkle. When Mr. Matthau asked why Lemmon was virtually handing him the movie, his chum replied; "Isn't it about time?"

Two years later, the two co-starred in the movie "Odd Couple" and Mr. Matthau remained a top-rank leading man for the rest of his life.

It was a stardom that at first seemed unlikely, not because the imposing 6-foot-3 actor lacked talent or charisma, but because of his non-matinee idol looks. He liked to recall a lady who accosted him after a play set in a pool hall and complained that "you looked just like a poolroom bum!"

Unlike many actors, Mr. Matthau knew how poolroom bums--and gangsters, crooked lawyers and sportswriters--looked and acted.

Born Walter Matuschanskayasky on Oct. 1, 1920, on New York's Lower East Side to impoverished Russian-Jewish immigrants, he began acting while still a boy, after first selling sodas, at 11, in a Yiddish theater.

After serving in the Army Air Corps--and winning six battle stars--in World War II, Mr. Matthau attended the New School Dramatic Workshop and quickly carved out a career on Broadway. His first onstage role came at 28, as the octogenarian bishop in "Anne of the Thousand Days."

Mr. Matthau made his movie debut in 1955, in director-star Burt Lancaster's "The Kentuckian." That same year Wilder tried to cast him opposite Marilyn Monroe in the movie of "The Seven Year Itch," but 20th Century Fox preferred Tom Ewell. So Mr. Matthau had to wait nearly a decade before "The Odd Couple" changed his life.

He co-starred with Lemmon eight more times after "The Odd Couple"--in Wilder's 1974 film of the classic Chicago newspaper comedy, "The Front Page," in Wilder's 1981 "Buddy Buddy," in Oliver Stone's 1991 "JFK," in the two "Grumpy Old Men" comedies (1993 and 1995), in 1997's "Out to Sea," in 1998's "Odd Couple" sequel and in the 1996 film of Truman Capote's "The Grass Harp," directed by Mr. Matthau's son, Charles.

Whether playing leads or juicy character parts, Mr. Matthau always set the highest standard. He was equally convincing as the spoiled fortune hunter of Elaine May's "A New Leaf" (1971), the weary bank robber in Don Siegel's "Charley Varrick" (1973), the irascible old comic of Simon's "The Sunshine Boys" (1975), the boozy Little League coach of "The Bad News Bears" (1976) or as Albert Einstein in "I.Q." (1994).

His last great lead performance, as an elderly Central Park habitue, came in Herb Gardner's 1996 "I'm Not Rappaport."

Mr. Matthau, who had three children, was married twice, to the former Grace Geraldine Johnson and, since 1959, to Carol Marcus Matthau.

His one major flaw was a gambling addiction that he once estimated had cost him $5 million. But any bet on Walter Matthau's movie immortality is a sure thing. And though he specialized in playing tough pros and cynical wise guys, Lemmon insisted in a 1992 interview that his best friend was far different from that public image.

"Walter's a softie," Lemmon said.