The movie that indelibly created Matthau’s dourly hilarious persona, and won him his only Oscar (for supporting actor), was Billy Wilder’s “The Fortune Cookie” (1966). Wilder tailored the part of shyster lawyer Whiplash Willie for Matthau after seeing him play Oscar Madison on Broadway in Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple.” But the movie was almost his last. During filming Matthau suffered his first heart attack, and production had to shut down for three months while he recovered. “You see me going upstairs weighing 198 pounds,” Matthau recalled. “I walk in and I’m 160 pounds.”
The New York-born son of impoverished Russian-Jewish immigrants (with the tongue-twisting name Matuschanskayasky), Matthau started acting as a kid and made his Broadway debut in 1948. In his first decade in Hollywood he was in danger of being typecast as a villain (“King Creole,” “Fail-Safe,” “Charade”). But after he teamed up with Jack Lemmon–first in “The Fortune Cookie,” then in the film of “The Odd Couple”–he was transformed from a cynical second banana to a lovably sardonic leading man. Lemmon’s nervous-Nellie panic was the perfect foil for Matthau’s curt, hangdog disenchantment: their partnership spread out over more than three decades.
But there was more to Matthau than the irascible codger, a stereotype he felt curbed his range as an actor. Tan and bearded opposite Glenda Jackson in the 1978 “House Calls,” he proved a surprisingly seductive romantic leading man–funny, yes, but sexy too. He was memorable as the bank-robber hero in Don Siegel’s action movie “Charley Varrick,” and as the gruff, ambitious horse trainer in the family film “Casey’s Shadow.” Time after time he brought his infallible sense of comic timing to the movies of Neil Simon–“Plaza Suite,” “The Sunshine Boys,” “California Suite,” “I Ought to Be in Pictures”–earning Simon’s praise as “the greatest instinctive actor” he’d ever seen.
Matthau was skeptical and self-deprecating about his hugely successful movie career. He had won a Tony in 1962 playing an aristocratic Paris banker in “A Shot in the Dark.” “That’s where I was good–on the stage,” he told a reporter in 1996. “In the movies… passable. But on the stage I could move with freedom and ease. And I had something: presence. On screen, all the power is in the hands of the director or the editor.” He tried his hand at directing, a 1960 release called “Gangster Story,” which he dismissed as one of the worst movies ever made.
The surprise 1993 hit “Grumpy Old Men” (which reunited him with Lemmon) revivified his career. But even in his most assembly-line movies, Matthau’s sardonic presence was a refreshing draft of cool wind. In his last film, the lamentable “Hanging Up,” his acridly powerful performance as a dying screenwriter father lent the one note of reality to a misguided project. Matthau had the gift of making bad films look good and good films even better. No one else could make dyspepsia such a constant delight. No one, most likely, will again.
