Fred MacMurray

Frederick Martin MacMurray was born on August 30, 1908, in Kankakee, Illinois, to Maleta MacMurray and Frederick Talmadge MacMurray, a concert violinist, both of whom were originally from Wisconsin. His aunt, Fay Holderness, worked as a vaudeville performer and actress. As an infant, MacMurray moved with his family first to Madison, Wisconsin, where his father taught music, and later to Beaver Dam, his mother's birthplace. He attended school in Quincy, Illinois, where he participated in football, baseball, and track while also working at a local pea cannery. Following graduation, he received a full scholarship to Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin. He took up the saxophone to occupy his spare time and continued playing the instrument while attending the Chicago Art Institute in the evenings.

Before establishing himself as an actor, MacMurray pursued a career as a musician, performing with the George Olsen orchestra beginning in 1928 and subsequently with the Gus Arnheim orchestra from 1930. In 1928, he accompanied his mother to Los Angeles, where he found work as a film extra at $10 a day and played saxophone with the California Collegians, a vaudeville group drawn from the pit orchestra at the Warner Brothers Hollywood Theatre. That band was hired to perform on Broadway in Three's a Crowd, which ran from 1930 to 1931 and featured Fred Allen, Clifton Webb, and Libby Holman. MacMurray was offered an acting role in the production, marking the beginning of his Broadway career. He subsequently appeared in the musical Roberta, which ran from 1933 to 1934 alongside Sydney Greenstreet and Bob Hope. His Broadway work spanned the years 1930 to 1933.

MacMurray signed with Paramount Pictures in 1934, and his career as a major film leading man was underway by 1935. During the 1930s he worked with directors Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges and appeared opposite Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich, and Claudette Colbert, with whom he made seven films beginning with The Gilded Lily. He also 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. By 1943, his annual salary had reached $420,000, making him the highest-paid actor in Hollywood and the fourth-highest-paid individual in the nation. In 1944, his earnings rose further to $439,000, again placing him at the top of Hollywood's pay scale.

MacMurray's most critically recognized film performance came in Billy Wilder's 1944 film noir Double Indemnity, in which he played Walter Neff, an insurance salesman who conspires with a greedy wife to murder her husband. MacMurray himself stated in 1956 that the role was his favorite and that it proved he was capable of serious acting. He continued to take on morally complex characters, including the cynical and duplicitous Lieutenant Thomas Keefer in Edward Dmytryk's The Caine Mutiny and the two-timing corporate executive Jeff Sheldrake in Wilder's Academy Award-winning film The Apartment. He also appeared in radio, starring in numerous episodes of Lux Radio Theatre in the late 1930s and 1940s, and returning to the medium in 1952 to appear in Bright Star alongside Irene Dunne, in which he portrayed a newspaper reporter.

From 1959 onward, MacMurray became closely associated with Walt Disney Studios, appearing in a series of family films including The Shaggy Dog, The Absent-Minded Professor, its sequel Son of Flubber, Follow Me Boys!, and The Happiest Millionaire. Concurrently, he starred as Steve Douglas in the television series My Three Sons, which ran from 1960 to 1972. His contract for the series included a provision requiring all of his scenes to be filmed in two separate month-long production blocks, allowing him time to work on films, manage his ranch in Northern California, and pursue golf. In 1958, he had guest-starred in the premiere episode of NBC's Cimarron City alongside George Montgomery and John Smith.

Beyond his entertainment career, MacMurray was a substantial businessman. In 1941, he purchased 1,750 acres in the Russian River Valley in Northern California, establishing MacMurray Ranch, where he raised prize-winning Aberdeen Angus cattle and cultivated prunes, apples, alfalfa, and other crops. Five years after his death, in 1996, the property was sold to Gallo, which planted vineyards on it for wines bearing the MacMurray Ranch label. In the early 1970s, he appeared in commercials for Greyhound Lines, and in 1979 he appeared in a series of commercials for the Korean chisenbop math calculation program. His final film was The Swarm, directed by Irwin Allen and co-starring Michael Caine, Olivia de Havilland, and Henry Fonda. MacMurray had originally been approached for a larger role in an Allen project but withdrew after a diagnosis of throat cancer; Allen subsequently cast him in the smaller role of a pharmacist, requiring only two days on set. He successfully completed treatment for the cancer during production. Frederick Martin MacMurray died on November 5, 1991, having built a career in film, television, and theater that spanned nearly half a century and encompassed more than one hundred films.