Fred MacMurray

Frederick Martin MacMurray was born on August 30, 1908, in Kankakee, Illinois, to Maleta Martin and Frederick Talmadge MacMurray, a concert violinist; both parents were from Wisconsin. His aunt, Fay Holderness, worked in vaudeville. As a baby, he moved with his family to Madison, Wisconsin, where his father taught music, and later to Beaver Dam, his mother’s hometown. He attended school in Quincy, Illinois, playing football, baseball, and track, and working in a pea cannery. After graduating, he earned a full scholarship to Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and played saxophone in local bands, having taken up the instrument in his spare time. He also studied at the Chicago Art Institute in the evenings.

MacMurray began his career as a musician, singing and playing saxophone with the George Olsen orchestra from 1928 and then with Gus Arnheim from 1930. In 1928, he drove his mother to Los Angeles for her health, where he found extra work for $10 a day and continued playing saxophone with the California Collegians, a vaudeville group formed from the Warner Brothers Hollywood Theatre pit orchestra. The band was hired for the Broadway show *Three’s a Crowd* (1930–31), moving him to New York City. He was offered a role in that production, leading to a part in the musical *Roberta* alongside Sydney Greenstreet and Bob Hope (1933–34). He signed with Paramount Pictures in 1934.

In the 1930s, MacMurray worked with directors Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, and actors such as Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich, and Claudette Colbert (in seven films, starting with *The Gilded Lily*). He co-starred with Katharine Hepburn in *Alice Adams*, Joan Crawford in *Above Suspicion*, and Carole Lombard in four films. Usually cast in light comedies, melodramas, and musicals as a decent, thoughtful character, he became one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors. In 1943, his annual salary reached $420,000, making him the highest-paid actor in Hollywood and the fourth-highest-paid person in the nation. During World War II, he did not serve in the military but sold war bonds and worked as an air-raid warden in Brentwood. His films from this period were considered morale-boosters rather than war pictures. In 1944, his earnings rose to $439,000, again making him the highest-paid actor.

During the 1947 film *The Egg and I*, the hens laid over 300 eggs. MacMurray and co-star Claudette Colbert autographed one egg each in fifty cartons, which were sold at a farmers market, with profits donated to the Braille Institute of America. After starring in many *Lux Radio Theatre* episodes in the late 1930s and 1940s, he returned to radio in 1952 with *Bright Star*, playing a reporter alongside Irene Dunne.

Though often typecast as a “nice guy,” MacMurray said his best roles were when he played against type, as in films by Billy Wilder and Edward Dmytryk. His most famous “bad guy” performance was as insurance salesman Walter Neff in the film noir *Double Indemnity* (1944). In 1956, he called it his favorite role, saying it proved he could do serious acting. He also played the cynical Lieutenant Thomas Keefer in Dmytryk’s *The Caine Mutiny* and the two-timing executive Jeff Sheldrake in Wilder’s *The Apartment*. In 1958, he guest-starred in the premiere of NBC’s *Cimarron City*. The following year, he was cast as the father in the Disney film *The Shaggy Dog*.

In a 1956 interview, MacMurray said he had been asked to play Perry Mason on television but turned it down, explaining he wanted to do as little TV work as possible because it was a lot of work. From 1960 to 1972, he starred in the long-running, highly rated series *My Three Sons*. Concurrently, he appeared in other films, playing Professor Ned Brainard in *The Absent-Minded Professor* and its sequel *Son of Flubber*.