A gifted and versatile actor whose best work made the process of performance invisible, Walter Matthau was 79 when he died of a heart attack on Saturday at a hospital in Santa Monica, California. The definitive poker-faced actor, he moved comfortably between comic and serious parts , and from supporting roles to playing the lead. He was born Walter Matuschanskavasky, the son of poor Jewish-Russian emigrants, in New York city on October 1st 1920. After serving in the US Air Force during the second World War, he turned to drama studies and made his Broadway debut in 1948, followed by his first film appearance, down the credits of The Kentuckian, in 1955.
Matthau firmly established himself as a formidable character actor in movies such as A Face in the Crowd, Lonely Are The Brave and Charade - to the point where he seemed fated to play only supporting roles. He certainly did not have the looks for a conventional movie star at the time.
That all changed in 1965 when he was cast as the cantankerous and slovenly sports writer, Oscar Madison, in Neil Simon's Broadway comedy The Odd Couple - a character Simon had based on Matthau's own personality.
A year later Matthau won the Oscar for best supporting actor for his scene-stealing performance in the acerbic insurance fraud comedy The Fortune Cookie (released here as Neat Whiplash Willie). It marked the first of Matthau's eight films with Jack Lemmon , and they followed it in 1968, perfectly cast as opposites who are stuck with each other in the spirited cinema version of The Odd Couple.
Over the next dozen or so years Matthau seized on his new status as a leading man to demonstrate his range in such notable movies as Cactus Flower, A New Leaf, Kotch (directed by Lemmon), Pete 'n' Tillie, Charley Varrick, The Front Page and The Sunshine Boys.
The past two decades saw Matthau regularly reduced to self-parody in thinly scripted efforts, such as the two Grumpy Old Men movies he made with Lemmon, and the laboured, mis-fired sequel The Odd Couple II. His final screen performance was equally undemanding, playing an ailing cranky pater familias in Diane Keaton's witless Hanging Up, which was released here in May. Those forgettable films, however, have not diminished the memory of the gruff, yet endearing Matthau at his finest, and that memory will live on as his best work is repeated over and over on television around the world.
Reuters adds: "I much regret that we will not see him any more," director Billy Wilder said. "He was a first-class man and a great human being." Matthau was Wilder's only choice to play the lawyer in The Fortune Cookie. A decade earlier, Wilder had tested Matthau for the male lead opposite Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch. Matthau directed one movie, The Gangster Story (1960), in which he co-starred. He later described it as "the worst film ever made".