31 Facts About Fred MacMurray

Frederick Martin MacMurray was an American actor.

Fred MacMurray appeared in more than one hundred films and a successful television series in a career that spanned nearly a half-century.

Fred MacMurray starred as Steve Douglas in the television series My Three Sons.

Frederick Martin MacMurray was born on August 30,1908, in Kankakee, Illinois, the son of Maleta and concert violinist Frederick Talmadge MacMurray, both natives of Wisconsin.

Fred MacMurray's aunt, Fay Holderness, was a vaudeville performer and actress.

When Fred MacMurray was an infant, his family moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where his father taught music.

Fred MacMurray attended school in Quincy, Illinois, where he played football and baseball, ran on the track team and worked in a local pea cannery.

Fred MacMurray played the saxophone in numerous local bands, having picked up the instrument when he was looking to fill his spare time.

Fred MacMurray continued to play saxophone while attending the Chicago Art Institute in the evenings.

Fred MacMurray was offered a role in the production, leading to a further casting in the musical Roberta alongside Sydney Greenstreet and Bob Hope.

Fred MacMurray co-starred with Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams, with Joan Crawford in Above Suspicion, and with Carole Lombard in four productions: Hands Across the Table, The Princess Comes Across, Swing High, Swing Low and True Confession.

Usually cast in light comedies as a decent, thoughtful character, and in melodramas and musicals, Fred MacMurray became one of the film industry's highest-paid actors of the period.

Fred MacMurray did not serve in the military during the Second World War, instead working to sell war bonds and as an air-raid warden in his Brentwood neighborhood.

Fred MacMurray featured in Bright Star, along with Irene Dunne, in which he portrayed a reporter for a local newspaper.

Six years later, Fred MacMurray played Jeff Sheldrake, a two-timing corporate executive in Wilder's Oscar-winning film The Apartment.

Fred MacMurray's career continued upward the following year, when he was cast as the father in the Disney film The Shaggy Dog.

Concurrently with it, Fred MacMurray starred in other films, playing Professor Ned Brainard in The Absent-Minded Professor and its sequel Son of Flubber.

Fred MacMurray was a prolific businessman, frequently earning over $400,000 a year in the 1940s.

Fred MacMurray wanted the property's agricultural heritage preserved, so five years after his death, in 1996, it was sold to Gallo, which planted vineyards on it for wines that bear the Fred MacMurray Ranch label.

Fred MacMurray insisted upon a percentage of gross of the films in which he starred.

In 1945, along with former actor Leslie Fenton, Fred MacMurray formed a production company, entitled "Mutual Pictures".

Fred MacMurray stated that the myth of his wealth being in league with Doris Duke and the Aga Khan stemmed from his life-long frugality.

Lamont and Fred MacMurray met during the production of Roberta while in New York City while he was performing with the Collegians in 1934, and they quickly became an item.

Later in his son's life, the father and son would drift apart, with Fred MacMurray lamenting that Robert went "the hippie route via the South Seas to 'find himself'".

Fred MacMurray eventually succumbed to kidney and heart issues in June 1953, shortly after the couple's 17th wedding anniversary.

Fred MacMurray first met actress June Haver when they starred in Where Do We Go From Here in 1945, although they had little interaction.

Fred MacMurray realized after eight months that the convent life was not for her.

Fred MacMurray purchased actor Red Skelton's good-luck pinky ring as an engagement ring, officially proposing to Haver after a trip to a drugstore.

Fred MacMurray joined a long list of Hollywood stars as a member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, which was organized by the Communist Party of the USA in 1936.

Fred MacMurray appeared onstage along with other conservative luminaries stumping for Thomas Dewey in the 1944 Presidential election, and he supported Ronald Reagan for Governor of California in 1966.

Fred MacMurray had a severe stroke in December 1988 that paralyzed his right side and affected his speech.