Walter Matthau

Walter Matthau was an Academy Award winning American comedy actor who spent more than fifty years performing in film, television, and theater. He is best known for his role as Oscar Madison in 1998’s The Odd Couple II, with co-star Jack Lemmon, whom he also appeared with in other films. Matthau died on July 1, 2000, of a heart attack.

He was nominated for an Academy Award twice in the Best Actor category for Kotch in 1971 and Sunshine Boys in 1975. He also won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Fortune Cookie in 1966, as well as a Golden Globe Award for his performance in Sunshine Boys.

Matthau was born as Walter John Matthow on October 1, 1920, in New York City, to Russian-Jewish immigrants. He started acting in the Yiddish theater in New York where he decided to change to spelling of his surname to what he considered to be the more elegant Matthau.

During World War II Matthau served in the Air Force as a radioman-gunner, where he reached the rank of Staff Sergeant. After returning from overseas, he began studying at the Dramatic Workshop in the New School in New York City. In 1948 he made his Broadway debut in Anne of the Thousand Days where he played an eighty-year-old man. For almost twenty years he made a living for himself as a respected stage actor, and he won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor for his role in the 1962 play A Shot in the Dark.

In 1955 Matthau made his movie debut as a whip-wielding bad guy in The Kentuckian, and followed it up with roles in The Indian Fighter, A Face in the Crowd, Slaughter of Tenth Avenue, Ride a Crooked Trail, and King Creole.

In 1960 Matthau directed and appeared in Gangster Story, which co-starred his second wife, Carol Grace, whom he married on August 21, 1959. The couple had one child together, son Charlie. Carol Grace died of a brain aneurysm in 2003.

Matthau also had two children, Jenny and David, with his first wife Grace Geraldine Johnson, whom he married in 1948 and divorced ten years later.

Matthau finally reached success and name recognition in 1965 at forty-four years old when he acted in The Odd Couple. In 1966 he again achieved glory with co-star Jack Lemmon in The Fortune Cookie.

After the movie, Matthau and Lemmon became lifelong friends and ended up making a total of ten movies together. Lemmon died from cancer almost exactly one year after Matthau’s death.