A fan once stopped Walter Matthau on Coney Island and said to him: "Handsome? I've seen better. But you're something, I don't know what". She was absolutely right. Matthau, who has died aged 79, was quite something. But never your conventional Hollywood star.
There is hardly a director in the world who would not have welcomed him into his cast - Danny Boyle wanted him to play God in A Life Less Ordinary, but he could just as well have played the Devil. He was almost everybody's favourite character actor who, if he couldn't quite hold a film on his own, formed some notable partnerships on the screen. He rose to the challenge of a good script and another first-class actor with unbeatable panache. He was mostly closely identified with Jack Lemmon in The Fortune Cookie (1966), The Odd Couple (1968), The Front Page (1975) and Buddy Buddy (1981). And as a seamed veteran - was he ever really young? - he matched with him again in Grumpy Old Men (1993).
By then both he and Jack had become unwitting caricatures of themselves. But no matter what Hollywood did to him, Matthau managed slyly to momentarily transcend the part. He had plenty of practice. For some years he was cast either as a smirky villain or as the American version of a jolly decent chap. His first film, The Kentuckian (1955), in which he was an evil saloon keeper, was followed by A Face In The Crowd (1957), Charade (1963), Fail Safe (1964) and Goodbye Charlie (1964). But Matthau was still largely unfulfilled, and knew it.
It was Gene Saks's The Odd Couple, which he had played with great success on Broadway, that really made him. After that, Hollywood and particularly the shrewd Billy Wilder, knew what to do with him. Wilder always used to think of Matthau as the quintessential conman - "Watch out," he once commented, "this guy could sell you Brooklyn Bridge."
Saks's film of The Odd Couple, taken from the Neil Simon original, wasn't all that great. But nobody could have played it better than Matthau and Lemmon, the one nervy and panic-stricken, the other totally unable to comprehend the reason why.
Other film-makers followed. Matthau was wonderfully curmudgeonly, coupled with Anne Archer, in George Axelrod's The Secret Life Of An American Wife (1968); hilarious opposite Elaine May in her underrated A New Leaf (1971) and, playing with the great George Burns,who also could time a line to perfection, made Herbert Ross's The Sunshine Boys (1975) into something special.
There were some comparatively straight parts in films like Don Siegel's clever Charley Varrick (1973), where Matthau played a bank robber hounded by the Mafia, and as Senator Russell Long in Oliver Stone's JFK (1991). But by then he was best-known for just being Matthau - wry and ironic, slightly crumpled, derisive of himself and the world at large and a dab hand at timing a line for the maximum effect.
All this hid a more complex personality not unfamiliar with depression, probably the result of his awful childhood, who would tell funny anecdotes on TV talk shows to prevent anyone enquiring too closely about his private life. He was a star who seemed to be giving confidences away by the bucketload but actually told you absolutely nothing personal. The less you say about yourself, he was quoted as saying, the better off you are.
Born in New York, Matthau was always said to be the son of a Russian Orthodox priest who had emigrated to America and eventually migrated from his family. But it seems father was an electrician, carpenter and photographer in whose life prayer did not play a prime part. Nor did his son, so Walter was brought up in the Daughters of Israel Day Nursery while his mother worked as a seamstress for upwards of 12 hours a day to keep everything together.
All this had its effect on him, as did his mother who used, because of her extreme poverty, to collect toilet paper from diners where she had a cup of coffee. Even when Matthau was one of the highest paid Hollywood actors, she did so, despite his protests. At one time she had 15 large paper bags full and a furious Matthau, trying to break her of the habit, put them in the bath and turned the tap on. When he came back to the new apartment he had bought for her in Florida, he found the paper spread all over the terrace floor to dry.
He had started life very much as a poor Jewish boy from the Lower East side whose real name was Matuschanskayasky. Just for fun, he called himself that as the drunk in Mark Robson's Earthquake (1974), where I met him on the set. "This," he said, "is a film which gives me the shakes in more ways than one. I do not wish to comment further until I hear what Charlton Heston has to say to you. He's a serious fellow, and we might not quite match up, you know." I got the impression, since he was playing an alcoholic, that I was talking to a reincarnation of W C Fields. It's a great pity he never played Fields on the screen.
He changed his name soon after appearing as a child actor in New York's Yiddish Theatre, realising that you couldn't get very far with it in show business. During the second world war he served in the USAF as a radioman and gunner, finally making his proper acting debut first in summer stock and then on Broadway in 1946. The part of Oscar in the stage version of The Odd Couple was written for him.
But to him it seemed a long time before he was appreciated as a comic talent. He used to say that he learned most about his craft (which he took so seriously it seemed as if he was not really trying at all) from his days in live television when accidents regularly happened, like the phone ringing when it wasn't supposed to. At that point smarties like him would lift the receiver and put the other actor on the spot by saying: "It's for you".
Matthau was latterly dogged by ill-health - heart disease, facial cancer and ulcers. He would say, contemplating all this and the resulting doctors' bills, that a philosophy for life was probably a necessity but that he could never fasten his mind on one in particular. When asked, he would say that "life was like a cup of tea", prompting the question "why?" - to which his reply was "why not?". Since by then he looked passably old and wise, there would be no real argument.
As for advice about acting, Matthau would quote his mother: "You know," she would say, "'If you'd had a decent father, you could have been a lawyer." Then he would add: "An actor is one who sings and dances on the street and passes the hat to get pennies. It's shameful. But you've got to live, so you make a fool of yourself, which is essentially what I do." What he didn't say was that not many exemplified his craft better and that he gave enormous pleasure to millions. Which is not a shameful thing at all.
Matthau had two children from his first marriage, and a son, Charles, who became a film-maker, from his second marriage, to Carol Marcus.
• Walter Matthau, actor, born October 1 1920; died July 1 2000
