Celebrity Biographies
Bill Macy
He played Bea Arthur’s husband, Walter Findlay, in the 1970s series “Maude” and was a prolific supporting actor on film and television. Bill Macy – who is not related to William H. Macy – passed away on Thursday, October 17, 2019, at the age of 97. “It was a volcano to the end,” wrote producer and manager Matt Beckoff. “My condolences to his beautiful wife, Samantha Harper Macy.”
Born on May 18, 1922, in Revere (Massachusetts, Wolf Martin Garber –his real name– in a Jewish family. He grew up in New York, where he began working as a taxi driver, while auditioning for shows, until they chose him as a stand-in for Walter Matthau in the show “Once More, With Feeling on Broadway”, in 1958. He debuted in the audiovisual industry with a role that was going to be very good for him, a taxi driver, in the series The Edge of the Night His first feature film was The Producers , by Mel Brooks , where he appears briefly as a judge.
On stage, he achieved enormous success with the Off-Broadway musical “Oh, Calcutta!”, and later reprized his role in the film version. On stage, Bill Macy fell in love with fellow actress Samantha Harper , who would later become his wife. After a role in films like The Cat Meets the Killer , he was recruited as the husband of the protagonist – Bea Arthur – of Maude , which had six seasons. “On the street, people stopped me. They called me Mr. Maude, and they consoled me for having such a difficult wife. I used to tell them that unfortunately there were people like that,” he said in an interview. He last appeared in an episode of Nurse Hawthorne , in 2010.