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| Image courtesy goldenglobes.com |
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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| Image courtesy nytimes.com |
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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| Image courtesy austinchronicle.com |
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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| Image courtesy totalwine.com |
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.
