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Walter Matthau: Odd Couple
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Actor Walter Matthau is seen in Beverly Hills, Ca., in this Feb. 12, 1990 photo. Matthau, the foghorn-voiced curmudgeon who became a master of comedy with his Oscar-winning "The Fortune Cookie" and such other hits as "The Odd Couple" and "Grumpy Old Men," died July 1, 2000 of a heart attack at 79.
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Matthau was at his funniest playing the gloriously ornery slob whom you might find sitting across a card table, with cigar in one hand and beer can in the other as he hangs out with his cronies. The comedy is derived from his characters' becoming involved in unlikely situations. In The Odd Couple, Matthau's Oscar Madison becomes the roommate of Felix Ungar. In The Bad News Bears, Matthau's Morris Buttermaker, another slob-supreme, is coerced into coaching a team of Little League misfits. In these films, he combines a sort of grouchy shiftiness with soul, wit, cunning, nonjudgmental forbearance, and obstinate persistence. Later on in his career, he caricatured this persnickety persona in Dennis the Menace, playing the forever-flustered Mr. Wilson.
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At the height of urban paranoia and the birth of survivalist movement in the 1980s, director Michael Ritchie decided to team Robin Williams and Walter Matthau in The Survivors. Talk about an odd couple; yet it actually might have worked, with Matthau's hang-dog deadpan and Williams' manic energy, were it not for a limp script by Michael Leeson. Williams and Matthau play two victims of Reaganomics, unemployed acquaintances who witness a robbery and identify one of the participants to the police, an act that turns them into targets for the robber in question who comes looking for them. Williams' response: become a one-man arsenal and join a training camp for militant survivalists. But the comedy is neither sharp enough nor sufficiently smart to pull it off; Matthau is the calm centre while Williams' comedy rockets all around him, to surprisingly little effect. --Marshall Fine, Amazon.com
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Matthau suffered his first heart attack in 1965. In 1968, while filming the movie The Odd Couple, Matthau suffered a second heart attack. In 1975, he underwent quadruple coronary bypass surgery. He spent two weeks in St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica in May of 1999 with pneumonia, and according to one report, during that time they discovered colon cancer, which spread to his liver, lungs and brain. Matthau died at the age of 79 on July 1, 2000, at 1:42 AM in St. John’s Health Center, of a heart attack.
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The sweet smell of success came late for Matthau. He was 45 when, in 1965, Neil Simon cast him in the hit play The Odd Couple opposite Art Carney. It was ... during this time that Matthau nearly died of a heart attack. In 1966, he again achieved glory as a shady lawyer opposite Jack Lemmon in The Fortune Cookie.
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"The Odd Couple" and "The Fortune Cookie" elevated Matthau to stardom, and he enjoyed a wide variety of roles for more than 30 years. He appeared in action thrillers such as "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three." He even did a musical, "Hello Dolly!" costarring with Barbra Streisand, with whom he publicly feuded.
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Odd Couple