The rumpled, magnificent, impossible-to-ignore face of American screen comedy — a Bronx-born original whose deadpan could level a room and whose timing was, by general consent, flawless.
Portrait · Walter Matthau
Born Walter John Matthow on October 1, 1920, in the Lower East Side of Manhattan — later raised in the Bronx — Matthau grew up in near-poverty, one of two sons of a Russian-Jewish immigrant father who abandoned the family early. He sold candy and soft drinks at a Yiddish theatre as a child, absorbing performance from the wings without knowing it.
After service in World War II as a cryptographer and gunner, he studied at the New School's Dramatic Workshop under Erwin Piscator. He spent the 1950s building one of the most respected stage careers in New York, winning a Tony Award for A Shot in the Dark (1962) and establishing himself as a character actor of formidable range well before Hollywood fully understood what it had.
His film breakthrough came with Billy Wilder's The Fortune Cookie (1966), in which his first pairing with Jack Lemmon produced immediate chemistry and earned him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Wilder immediately recognized what he had: someone who could be funny and sad in the same breath, without signaling the transition.
The partnership with Lemmon — nine films over three decades — became one of cinema's great odd-couple pairings, and The Odd Couple (1968) their defining monument. Offscreen, Matthau was a compulsive gambler who lost and won fortunes, a contradictory figure whose messiness fed rather than damaged his art.
Matthau's Oscar Madison — slovenly, warm, ungovernable — is one of screen comedy's great creations. His timing against Lemmon's increasingly neurotic Felix is a masterclass in reactive performance. He never tries to be funny. He simply is.
Matthau's Whiplash Willie Gingrich is a monument of gleeful amorality — corrupt, funny, and somehow sympathetic. Wilder knew immediately he'd found something. The film launched the most important comic partnership in 1960s Hollywood.
Against a city on the edge of collapse, Matthau holds the film together with pure presence — exhausted, methodical, and faintly amused. One of his finest dramatic performances, largely unrecognized as such.
Directed by Jack Lemmon in his only directorial feature, Kotch earned Matthau an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor — a reminder that the comedy was always rooted in something real.
Matthau's Coach Buttermaker is disreputable, lazy, and oddly redemptive — a role that could only work with someone who could make you root for a man you wouldn't trust with your car keys. A 1970s classic.
I'm a nice enough fellow to be around when I'm not being horrible.
Walter Matthau represented something Hollywood studios have never been able to reliably produce: a face and a presence that was completely, irreducibly itself. His features — described variously as a bloodhound, a basset hound, and a rumpled paper bag — were not conventionally handsome, and that was precisely the point. He looked like someone you'd actually know, and performed like no one you'd ever seen.
The comedic tradition he represented — dry, urban, Jewish in its rhythms, rooted in failure rather than triumph — found its fullest expression on screen in Matthau. He passed it to no direct heir because it couldn't be transferred. What he did was too specifically his.