Walter Matthau

Walter Matthau was born Walter Matuschanskayasky in New York City in 1920 and spent roughly two decades as a working stage and character actor before becoming, in middle age, an unlikely leading man of considerable range, equally at home in broad comedy and hard-edged drama. He played Alexander Dyle, alias Hamilton Bartholomew, in Stanley Donen's Charade (1963) opposite Grant and Audrey Hepburn, a supporting role built around a late plot reversal in which his ostensibly helpful CIA contact is revealed to be one of the film's several duplicitous figures pursuing a fortune in stolen gold. The performance is a compact demonstration of the deadpan control that would define his later comic work. Matthau's major breakthroughs came shortly afterward: The Fortune Cookie (1966), his first pairing with Jack Lemmon under director Billy Wilder, brought him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1967 and began a screen partnership with Lemmon that continued for decades. He followed it with The Odd Couple (1968), playing the slovenly Oscar Madison opposite Lemmon's fastidious Felix Unger, and later The Sunshine Boys (1975), for which he received a further Academy Award nomination. Matthau continued working steadily into the 1990s, reuniting with Lemmon repeatedly, including in Grumpy Old Men (1993). He died in Santa Monica, California, in 2000. His single film with Grant, Charade, sits early in the run of performances that made his reputation as one of the era's most durable character-turned-leading actors.