Frederick Martin MacMurray (August 30, 1908 – November 5, 1991) was an American actor. He appeared in more than one hundred films and a successful television series in a career that spanned nearly a half-century. His career as a major film leading man began in 1935, but his most renowned role was in Billy Wilder's 1944 film noir Double Indemnity. From 1959 to 1973, MacMurray appeared in numerous Disney films, including The Shaggy Dog, The Absent-Minded Professor, Follow Me, Boys!, and The Happiest Millionaire. He starred as Steve Douglas in the television series My Three Sons.
Frederick Martin MacMurray was born on August 30, 1908, in Kankakee, Illinois, the son of Maleta (née Martin) and concert violinist Frederick Talmadge MacMurray, both natives of Wisconsin. His aunt, Fay Holderness, was a vaudeville performer and actress. When MacMurray was an infant, his family moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where his father taught music. They relocated within the state to Beaver Dam, his mother's birthplace.
MacMurray attended school in Quincy, Illinois, where he played football and baseball, ran on the track team and worked in a local pea cannery. After graduation, he received a full scholarship to Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin. He played the saxophone in numerous local bands, having picked up the instrument when he was looking to fill his spare time. He continued to play saxophone while attending the Chicago Art Institute in the evenings.
MacMurray sang and played saxophone with two of the leading dance bands of the day. Firstly with the George Olsen orchestra from 1928 and then Gus Arnheim from 1930.
In 1928, MacMurray chauffeured his mother to Los Angeles for her health and to visit family. While there he found work as an extra and continued his saxophone playing, then with the California Collegians, a vaudeville group that was formed out of the pit orchestra at the Warner Brothers Hollywood Theatre. His extra work was earning him $10 a day. The band was hired to appear on Broadway in Three's a Crowd (1930–31) with Fred Allen, Clifton Webb and Libby Holman, resulting in a move to New York City from California. MacMurray was offered a role in the production, leading to a further casting in the musical Roberta alongside Sydney Greenstreet and Bob Hope (1933–34). MacMurray signed with Paramount Pictures in 1934.
In the 1930s, MacMurray worked with film directors Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, and actors Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich, and in seven films, Claudette Colbert, beginning with The Gilded Lily. He co-starred with Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams, with Joan Crawford in Above Suspicion, and with Carole Lombard in four productions: Hands Across the Table, The Princess Comes Across, Swing High, Swing Low and True Confession. Usually cast in light comedies as a decent, thoughtful character (The Trail of the Lonesome Pine), and in melodramas and musicals, MacMurray became one of the film industry's highest-paid actors of the period. In 1943, his annual salary had reached $420,000, making him the highest-paid actor in Hollywood and the fourth-highest-paid person in the nation.
MacMurray did not serve in the military during the Second World War, instead working to sell war bonds and as an air-raid warden in his Brentwood neighborhood. The movies that he did produce during this period were mostly considered to be "morale-boosters" rather than outright "war pictures" that some of his contemporaries were churning out. In 1944, his earnings increased to $439,000, making him again the highest-paid actor.
During the production of the 1947 film The Egg and I, the hens appearing in the movie laid over 300 eggs. MacMurray and costar Claudette Colbert autographed one egg each in fifty cartons. The eggs were sold at a local farmers market and profits were donated to the Braille Institute of America.
Having starred in many episodes of Lux Radio Theatre in the late 1930s and 1940s, MacMurray returned to the medium in 1952. He featured in Bright Star, along with Irene Dunne, in which he portrayed a reporter for a local newspaper.
Despite being typecast as a "nice guy", MacMurray often said his best roles were when he was cast against type, such as under the direction of Billy Wilder and Edward Dmytryk. Perhaps his best known "bad guy" performance was that of Walter Neff, an insurance salesman who plots with a greedy wife to kill her husband in the film noir classic Double Indemnity. MacMurray stated in 1956 that this was his favorite role, and that it "...proved I could do serious acting". In another turn in the "not so nice" category, MacMurray played the cynical, duplicitous Lieutenant Thomas Keefer in Dmytryk's film The Caine Mutiny. Six years later, MacMurray played Jeff Sheldrake, a two-timing corporate executive in Wilder's Oscar-winning film The Apartment. In 1958, he guest-starred in the premiere episode of NBC's Cimarron City Western series, with George Montgomery and John Smith. MacMurray's career continued upward the following year, when he was cast as the father in the Disney film The Shaggy Dog.
In an interview with Hedda Hopper in 1956, MacMurray noted that he had been asked to take on the role of Perry Mason on television. He turned it down, saying "I want to do as little TV work as possible – it's lots of work. I guess I am just lazy".
From 1960 to 1972, he starred in My Three Sons, a long-running, highly rated TV series. Concurrently with it, MacMurray starred in other films, playing Professor Ned Brainard in The Absent-Minded Professor and its sequel Son of Flubber. Using his star-power clout, MacMurray had a provision in his My Three Sons contract that all of his scenes on that series were to be shot in two separate month-long production blocks and filmed first. That condensed performance schedule provided him more free time to pursue his work in films, maintain his ranch in Northern California, and enjoy his favorite leisure activity, golf. Over the years, MacMurray became one of the wealthiest actors in the entertainment industry, primarily from wise real estate investments and from his "notorious frugality".
In the early 1970s, MacMurray appeared in commercials for the Greyhound Lines bus company. In 1979, he appeared in a series of commercials for the Korean chisenbop math calculation program. MacMurray's final film was The Swarm, costarring Michael Caine, Olivia de Havilland and Henry Fonda. The actor, semi-retired at this point, was called back for one last film by director Irwin Allen entitled Fire!; however, his diagnosis of throat cancer caused him to pull out. Allen then offered him the small role (for a total of two days on set) of a pharmacist in The Swarm. MacMurray told reporters that he did not "...really miss it. A lot of actors go crazy if they aren't working, but I guess I'm a little lazy." He successfully underwent treatment for his cancer during the production.
MacMurray was also a prolific businessman, frequently earning over $400,000 a year in the 1940s. In 1941, he purchased land in the Russian River Valley in Northern California and established MacMurray Ranch. On the 1,750-acre (2.7 sq mi) ranch, he raised prize-winning Aberdeen Angus cattle, cultivated prunes, apples, alfalfa and other crops, and enjoyed watercolor painting, fly fishing, and skeet shooting. MacMurray wanted the property's agricultural heritage preserved, so five years after his death, in 1996, it was sold to Gallo, which planted vineyards on it for wines that bear the MacMurray Ranch label. One of MacMurray's children now lives on the property (in a cabin built by her father), and is "actively engaged in Sonoma's thriving wine community, carrying on her family's legacy and the heritage of MacMurray Ranch".
In 1944, he purchased the Bryson Apartment Hotel in the Westlake, Los Angeles neighborhood for $600,000, using profits from Double Indemnity, and was a co-owner of three other apartment buildings. The actor was cautious with his finances, which went hand-in-hand with his sedate lifestyle. The majority of his earnings were used for investments (including a knitting mill, co-owner of a golf-and-tennis club and a cold-storage business). MacMurray insisted upon a percentage of gross of the films in which he starred.