August 30 - Fred MacMurray

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On this day, in 1908, Frederick Martin MacMurray was born in Kankakee, Illinois. Fred’s performing abilities came down from his father’s side of the family: dad was a music teacher and his aunt spent time on the vaudeville circuit and appeared in a slew of silent films. By 1910, the MacMurray family had moved to the Madison, Wisconsin area, near where his mother had been born. During his adolescence, Fred developed his vocal talents and began playing the saxophone. He earned a full ride scholarship to Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin but failed to graduate. Maybe that was inevitable given his creative tendencies, but his time spent singing and playing with a variety of local bands certainly contributed to his dropping out. Not that it hurt him any in the long run.

In 1930, Fred was a featured vocalist on not one but three songs: All I Want Is Just One Girl with the Gus Arnheim Orchestra and I’m in the Market for You and After a Million Dreams, both with George Olsen’s band. This exposure helped him get into Broadway shows. The first was a musical revue, Three’s a Crowd, that ran for 271 performances starting in October of 1930. Two years later, Fred starred in Jerome Kern’s musical Roberta, alongside Bob Hope and Sydney Greenstreet, all three of them just waiting to become big Hollywood stars. That show ran for 295 performances, ending just in time for Fred to move to California to start his path to stardom as a contract player with Paramount Pictures.

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Fred jumped right into the deep end of movies almost as soon as he got to Hollywood, appearing in seven movies in 1935 alone. Throughout the rest of the Thirties and into the Forties, he worked with most of the heavy hitters in Tinsel Town: Katherine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Billy Wilder, Humphrey Bogart, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, the list goes on and on. Part of Fred’s genius was the ability to do just about any role. He could be the smart guy in a comedy, the bad guy in film noir and could hold his own in a musical. Because of his versatility, Fred quickly rose to the top of his profession. By 1943, he was the highest paid actor in town pulling in over $420,000 that year (the equivalent of over $6.2 million today). And most of his best known work was still to come.

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One of the great film noir performances, for Fred or anyone else, happened in 1944 when he took on the role of Walter Neff, the unscrupulous insurance salesman who not only conspires to murder Barbara Stanwyck’s husband but plans to make the insurer he works for pay for it in Double Indemnity. Fred pulled off another less than savory character a decade later opposite Humphrey Bogart as Lieutenant Thomas Keefer in The Caine Mutiny. His third famous go-around as a guy you’d like to punch in the face came in 1960 when he played Jeff Sheldrake, an adulterous businessman vying with Jack Lemmon for Shirley MacLaine’s um… affections in The Apartment. He once reported that women would publically berate him for Sheldrake’s sleaziness following the release of the now classic film. Arguably, though, his biggest roles were much nicer guys and mostly came about through a long relationship with the Walt Disney Company.

The names Fred MacMurray and Walt Disney were first joined together in people’s minds in 1959 when Fred was cast in the studio’s very first fully live action movie, The Shaggy Dog. Playing the father of the titular dog, he was able to help propel the movie to the biggest financial success Disney had ever enjoyed to that point (co-starring with Annette Funicello and Tommy Kirk didn’t hurt). I’m not saying this was a key factor in making Fred one of Walt’s favorite actors, but it certainly helped. So did the success of his subsequent films. In 1961, Fred reteamed with Tommy and first played Ned Brainard, nerdy scientist and creator of a super substance called flubber, in the smash hit The Absent-Minded Professor. That performance earned him a Golden Globe nomination, the only time the vastly underrated actor ever got any nomination. Professor was so popular it spawned Disney’s first sequel just two years later, The Son of Flubber, which Fred and Tommy of course returned for. In between the two flubber flicks, Fred and Tommy joined Jane Wyman for a family vacation comedy, Bon Voyage! Three more light hearted comedies followed: 1966’s Follow Me, Boys!, 1967’s The Happiest Millionaire and, finally, 1973’s Charlie and the Angel. Fred’s seven pictures with Disney comprised more than half of his last dozen film appearances and probably more than three quarters of what he’s recognized for today. And those seven pictures became the basis for Fred achieving another Disney first when, in 1987, he was declared the inaugural Disney Legend.

As if appearing in a fair number of hit movies throughout the Sixties wasn’t enough success for one man, Fred was also appearing weekly in a hit television show as well. In 1960, he was cast as Steven Douglas, an aeronautical engineer and widowed father of three sons, on the aptly named My Three Sons on CBS. The series also starred William Frawley (of I Love Lucy fame) and one of Fred’s co-stars from The Shaggy Dog, Tim Considine. For the next five years, My Three Sons was part of the bedrock of ABC’s lineup. When the network declined to pony up for a changeover to color filming, CBS gladly snapped it up, colorized it and ran with it for seven more years, finally ending it in 1972. With 380 episodes, it’s the ranks as the #3 sitcom (in terms of number of episodes) behind The Simpsons and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. And yes, just like The Simpsons has become, that final season was kind of unwatchable.

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Fred’s final acting gig came in 1978, during the disaster movie craze. He played the mayor of a Texas town being invaded by killer bees in The Swarm (which was apparently even worse than you can possibly imagine it) and decided to retire. Because, let’s face it, he didn’t need any more money. Not only was he once the highest paid actor in Hollywood, but he’d made some fantastic investments over the years and was estimated to be worth something in the range of $150 million when he died. So retiring to his 1750-acre ranch in Northern California wasn’t a bad deal at all. At least it wouldn’t have been if he hadn’t had a string of severe health problems. Fred, a lifelong smoker, was diagnosed with throat cancer in the late Seventies, shortly after ending his career. He beat it, but the cancer recurred in 1987. In the early Eighties, he was diagnosed with a mild form of leukemia, which he lived with for a decade. In 1988, he suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right side. He was able to recover about 90% of his movement over the next few years but it didn’t matter in end. In 1991, he contracted pneumonia and that was the final straw for his beleaguered body. Fred passed away in a Santa Monica hospital being treated for the pulmonary disease on November 5, 1991. He was 83.