41 Facts About Walter Matthau

1.

Walter Matthau was an American actor, comedian and film director.

2.

Walter Matthau is best known for his film roles in A Face in the Crowd, King Creole and as a coach of a hapless little league team in the baseball comedy The Bad News Bears.

3.

Walter Matthau starred in 10 films alongside Jack Lemmon, including The Odd Couple, The Front Page and Grumpy Old Men.

4.

Walter Matthau starred in Plaza Suite, Kotch, Charley Varrick, The Sunshine Boys, and Hopscotch.

5.

On Broadway, Walter Matthau originated the role of Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple by playwright Neil Simon, for which he received a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play in 1965, his second after A Shot in the Dark in 1962.

6.

Walter Matthau received two British Academy Film Awards and a Golden Globe Award.

7.

Walter Matthau had two brothers, one older and one younger.

8.

Walter Matthau's mother, Rose, was a Lithuanian-Jewish immigrant who worked in a garment sweatshop, and his father, Milton Matuschansky, was a Ukrainian-Jewish peddler and electrician, from Kyiv, Ukraine.

9.

Walter Matthau worked for a short time as a concession stand cashier in the Yiddish Theatre District.

10.

Walter Matthau was with the same 453rd Bombardment Group as James Stewart.

11.

Walter Matthau ended the war with the rank of Staff Sergeant, and returned home to America for demobilization at the war's end intent on pursuing a career as an actor.

12.

Walter Matthau was trained in acting at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School with German director Erwin Piscator.

13.

Walter Matthau often joked that his best early review came in a play where he posed as a derelict.

14.

Walter Matthau appeared in the pilot of Mister Peepers with Wally Cox.

15.

Walter Matthau's role was of the gym teacher Mr Wall.

16.

Walter Matthau made his motion picture debut as a whip-wielding bad guy in The Kentuckian opposite Burt Lancaster.

17.

Walter Matthau played a villain in King Creole, in which he gets beaten up by Elvis Presley.

18.

Walter Matthau appeared with James Mason in Bigger Than Life directed by Nicholas Ray.

19.

Walter Matthau directed a low-budget movie called The Gangster Story and played a sympathetic sheriff in Lonely Are the Brave, which starred Kirk Douglas.

20.

Walter Matthau appeared in the Cary Grant-Audrey Hepburn crime thriller Charade.

21.

Walter Matthau appeared eight times between 1962 and 1964 on The DuPont Show of the Week and as Franklin Gaer in an episode of Dr Kildare.

22.

Neil Simon cast him in the play The Odd Couple in 1965, with Walter Matthau playing slovenly sportswriter Oscar Madison, opposite Art Carney as Felix Ungar.

23.

Walter Matthau later reprised the role in the film version, with Jack Lemmon as Felix Unger.

24.

Walter Matthau played detective Ted Casselle in the Hitchcockian thriller Mirage, directed by Edward Dmytryk.

25.

Walter Matthau achieved great success in the comedy film, The Fortune Cookie, as a shyster lawyer, William H "Whiplash Willie" Gingrich, starring yet again opposite Lemmon; the first of many collaborations with Billy Wilder, and a role that would earn him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

26.

Walter Matthau gave up his three pack a day smoking habit as a result.

27.

Walter Matthau appeared during the Oscar telecast shortly after having been injured in a bicycle accident; nonetheless, he scolded actors who had not attended the ceremony, especially the other major award winners that night: Paul Scofield, Elizabeth Taylor and Sandy Dennis.

28.

Walter Matthau played three roles in the film version of Simon's Plaza Suite and was in the cast of its followup California Suite.

29.

Walter Matthau starred in three crime dramas in the mid-1970s, as a detective investigating a mass murder on a bus in The Laughing Policeman, as a bank robber on the run from the Mafia and the law in Charley Varrick and as a New York transit official in the action-adventure The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.

30.

Walter Matthau looked to produce some films with Universal Pictures, with his son Charlie becoming involved in his production company, Walcar Productions, but the only film he produced was the third remake of Little Miss Marker.

31.

Walter Matthau participated in the script revisions, and the film's director, Ronald Neame, observed that Walter Matthau's contributions entitled him to screen credit, but that was never pursued.

32.

Walter Matthau wrote the last scene of the film, where Kendig, presumed to be dead, disguises himself as a Sikh in order to enter a bookshop.

33.

Walter Matthau helped in choosing appropriate compositions by Mozart that made up much of the score.

34.

Walter Matthau portrayed Herbert Tucker in I Ought to Be in Pictures, with Ann-Margret and Dinah Manoff.

35.

Walter Matthau took the leading role of Captain Thomas Bartholomew Red in Roman Polanski's swashbuckler Pirates.

36.

Walter Matthau was married twice: first to Grace Geraldine Johnson from 1948 to 1958, and then to Carol Marcus from 1959 until his death in 2000.

37.

Walter Matthau had two children, Jenny and David, by his first wife, and a son, Charlie Matthau, with his second wife.

38.

Walter Matthau helped raise his stepchildren, Aram Saroyan and Lucy Saroyan.

39.

Walter Matthau was hospitalized in May 1999 for more than two months, owing again to pneumonia.

40.

Walter Matthau had atherosclerotic heart disease during the last years of his life.

41.

Walter Matthau was buried in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.