1. Walter John Matthau was an American actor, known for his "hangdog face" and for playing world-weary characters.
42 Facts About Walter Matthau
1. 2.
Walter Matthau starred in 10 films alongside his real-life friend Jack Lemmon, including The Odd Couple and Grumpy Old Men.
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On Broadway, Matthau originated the role of Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple by playwright Neil Simon, for which he received a Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Play in 1965, his second after A Shot in the Dark in 1962.
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Walter Matthau won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the Billy Wilder film The Fortune Cookie, with further Best Actor nominations for Kotch and The Sunshine Boys.
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Walter Matthau gained further recognition for his portrayal of the coach of a hapless little league team in the baseball comedy The Bad News Bears.
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Walter Matthau starred in Plaza Suite, Charley Varrick, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The Sunshine Boys, House Calls, Hopscotch and Dennis the Menace.
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Walter Matthau had two brothers, one older and one younger.
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Walter Matthau's parents were Jewish; his mother, Rose, was a Lithuanian immigrant who worked in a garment sweatshop, and his father, Milton Matuschansky, was a Ukrainian peddler and electrician from Kyiv.
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Walter Matthau worked for a short time as a concession stand cashier in the Yiddish Theatre District.
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Walter Matthau was with the same 453rd Bombardment Group as James Stewart.
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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.
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Walter Matthau was trained in acting at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School with German director Erwin Piscator.
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Walter Matthau often joked that his best early review came in a play where he posed as a derelict.
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Walter Matthau appeared in the pilot of Mister Peepers with Wally Cox.
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Walter Matthau's role was of the gym teacher Mr Wall.
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Walter Matthau made his motion picture debut as a whip-wielding bad guy in The Kentuckian opposite Burt Lancaster.
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Walter Matthau played a villain in King Creole, in which he gets beaten up by Elvis Presley.
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Walter Matthau appeared with James Mason in Bigger Than Life, directed by Nicholas Ray.
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Walter Matthau directed a low-budget film called The Gangster Story and played a sympathetic sheriff in Lonely Are the Brave, which starred Kirk Douglas.
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Walter Matthau appeared in the Cary Grant-Audrey Hepburn crime thriller Charade.
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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.
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Walter Matthau reprised the role in the film version, with Jack Lemmon as Felix Unger.
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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 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.
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Walter Matthau starred in House Calls, sharing the screen with Glenda Jackson and his Odd Couple stage partner, Carney.
30.
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-thriller The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.
31.
Walter Matthau reunited with Lemmon in the black comedy-drama The Front Page.
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Walter Matthau produced some films with Universal Pictures, with his son Charlie becoming involved in his production company, Walcar Productions, but the only film that he produced was the third remake of Little Miss Marker.
33.
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.
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Walter Matthau wrote the last scene of the film, where Kendig, presumed to be dead, disguises himself as a Sikh to enter a bookshop.
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Walter Matthau helped to choose appropriate compositions by Mozart that made up much of the score.
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Walter Matthau reunited with Lemmon in the comedy Buddy Buddy.
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Walter Matthau portrayed Herbert Tucker in I Ought to Be in Pictures with Ann-Margret and Dinah Manoff.
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Walter Matthau co-starred with Robin Williams in the 1983 dark comedy film The Survivors.
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Walter Matthau took the leading role of Captain Thomas Bartholomew Red in Roman Polanski's swashbuckler Pirates.
40.
In 1971, Walter Matthau discussed his longtime compulsive gambling with a writer for The New York Times.
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Walter Matthau was hospitalized in May 1999 for more than two months, again owing to pneumonia.
42.
Walter Matthau is buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.