Fred McMurray

Fredrick Martin MacMurray (full name of the actor) came into the world on August 30, 1908 in Kankakee (Illinois). His mother, Suitcase Martin, was a housewife, while his father, Fredrick MacMurray, a concert pianist, instilled in him a love of music from an early age. He soon began playing the saxophone, and studied music at the Art Institute of Chicago. When he left, he joined a Chicago orchestra for more than a year, and then another that performed in Hollywood, whose members made records and often appeared as extras in movies, almost always playing musicians. Young Fred was increasingly interested in movies, so after some of those roles, he was offered a major one in Three’s A Crowd , a Broadway musical with which he toured across the country.

Returning to California, MacMurray dedicated himself to vaudeville, performing in nightclubs of various categories. At that time, he took the opportunity to appear for tests, until he was chosen to play an important supporting role in Grand Old Girl , a romantic drama starring May Robson , RKO star of the time. Thanks to this work, the actor had the opportunity to sign a contract with Paramount. There he made his debut playing the lead in The Gilged Lily , a 1935 romantic comedy in which Ray Milland and Claudette Colbert also starred., with whom he would meet again on numerous occasions. The following year, MacMurray married Lilian Lamont, with whom he adopted two children. But as fate would have it, the marriage did not last long, as she died prematurely, in 1953. Later, MacMurray would marry actress June Harver, whom he met because she was his co-star in the musical Where Do We Go From . Here? , and with which he also adopted, this time two twins.

In the early days of his career, MacMurray excelled in elegantly shot romantic comedies. Along with Dreams of Youth , with Katharine Hepburn , and The Princess Come Across , with Carole Lombard , stands out Millionaire Candidate , one of the best films by specialist Mitchell Leisen , who co-starred the aforementioned Lombard. He played a ruined playboy, capable of anything to marry a rich heiress to restore his social position. Leisen was so satisfied that he turned to his services again for No time to love , Caprice of a woman , Ella and her secretary and herMemory of a night , which would pair him for the first time with Barbara Stanwyck , an actress who would accompany him in his best work, Perdición , by Billy Wilder , a landmark of black cinema, honored a thousand times in films of fatal women who manipulate their men at will. male lovers, as in Fuego en el cuerpo or La última seducción . MacMurray’s image of a timid man and Barbara Stanwyck’s image of a woman of arms made them ideal interpreters to tell this story. Both would coincide many years later, in There will always be a tomorrow , a melodrama by Douglas Sirkalso of manipulable man and woman of enormous personality. “I once asked Barbara Stanwyck about the secret to acting. She told me to lie, and if she was capable of deceiving someone, then she was capable of acting, ”the actor recalled about her screen partner.

In the 1950s, MacMurray’s filmography became more varied, appearing in adventure films such as Heading to Java , the stupendous war drama The Caine Mutiny , the tear-jerking drama The Women’s World , the film noir Pushover ; and the westerns Thus the Brave Die and Blue Horizons , despite the fact that he himself detracted from this genre: “A western actor only needs two gestures: with a hat and without a hat,” he said. One of the interpretations that left him most satisfied was that of the unscrupulous superior of the long-suffering Jack Lemmon in The Apartment ., because he was a character far removed from his way of being and his usual roles. “The two films I shot with Billy Wilder are the only two cases in which I had to act in my entire career,” he used to say. But this unforgettable bittersweet comedy from the 1960s marks the beginning of its decline. He survived the 1960s thanks to the help of Walt Disney , a close friend, who made him a fetish actor in his company’s live-action series B productions, with titles such as Daddy’s Conflicts , and above all, Un Wise Man in the Clouds and its sequel A Wise Man in a Trouble , where he was a clueless scientist who invented a curious substance known as Flubber. On television, he had great success with the sitcomMy Three Sons , which was on the air for over a decade. In the early 1980s, the actor starred in the show Disneyland , where he played various roles. In cinema, his last work was in high school in Irwin Allen ‘s The Swarm , a killer bee film starring Michael Caine . The actor died of pneumonia on November 5, 1991, at his residence in Santa Monica, at the age of 83