Bill Murray

This article is about the American actor and comedian. For other people named Bill Murray, see William Murray.

William James Murray (born September 21, 1950) is an American actor and comedian, known for his deadpan delivery. Murray rose to fame on The National Lampoon Radio Hour (1973–1974) before becoming a national presence on Saturday Night Live from 1977 to 1980, where he received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series. He starred in comedy films such as Meatballs (1979), Caddyshack (1980), Stripes (1981), Tootsie (1982), Ghostbusters (1984), Scrooged (1988), Ghostbusters II (1989), What About Bob? (1991), Groundhog Day (1993), Kingpin (1996), The Man Who Knew Too Little (1997) and Osmosis Jones (2001). His only directorial credit is Quick Change (1990), which he co-directed with Howard Franklin.

Murray's performance in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003) earned him a Golden Globe and a British Academy Film Award and an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. He has frequently collaborated with directors Ivan Reitman, Harold Ramis, Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Jim Jarmusch, John McNaughton and the Farrelly brothers. He received Golden Globe nominations for his roles in Ghostbusters, Rushmore (1998), Hyde Park on Hudson (2012), St. Vincent (2014) and the HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge (2014), for which he later won his second Primetime Emmy Award. Murray received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2016. Murray is also known for voicing Garfield in the family comedy film Garfield: The Movie (2004) and its sequel Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006), Clive Badger in Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Baloo in the live action adaptation of Disney's The Jungle Book (2016) and Boss in Isle of Dogs (2018).

Early life

Murray was born in Evanston, Illinois, to Lucille (née Collins) (1921-1988), a mail-room clerk, and Edward Joseph Murray II (1921-1967), a lumber salesman. He was raised in Wilmette, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago.

Murray and his eight siblings grew up in an Irish Catholic family. His paternal grandfather was from County Cork, while his maternal ancestors were from County Galway. Three of his siblings, John Murray, Joel Murray, and Brian Doyle-Murray, are also actors. A sister, Nancy, is an Adrian Dominican nun in Michigan; she has traveled the United States in two one-woman programs, portraying Catherine of Siena and Dorothy Stang His brother Ed Murray died in 2020. Their father died in 1967 at the age of 46 from complications of diabetes when Bill was 17 years old.

As a youth, Murray read children's biographies of American heroes like Kit Carson, Wild Bill Hickok, and Davy Crockett. He attended St. Joseph's grade school and Loyola Academy. During his teen years, he worked as a golf caddy to fund his education at the Jesuit high school. One of his sisters had polio and his mother suffered several miscarriages. During his teen years he was the lead singer of a rock band called the Dutch Masters and took part in high school and community theater.

After graduating from Loyola Academy, Murray attended Regis University in Denver, Colorado, taking pre-medical courses. He quickly dropped out and returned to Illinois. Decades later, in 2007, Regis awarded him an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree. On September 21, 1970, his 20th birthday, the police arrested Murray at Chicago's O'Hare Airport for trying to smuggle 10 lb (4.5 kg) of cannabis, which he had allegedly intended to sell. The drugs were discovered after Murray joked to the passenger next to him that he had packed a bomb in his luggage. Murray was convicted and sentenced to probation.

Career

1970s: Early work

Second City, National Lampoon

With an invitation from his older brother, Brian, Murray got his start at The Second City in Chicago, an improvisational comedy troupe, studying under Del Close. In 1974, he moved to New York City and was recruited by John Belushi as a featured player on The National Lampoon Radio Hour.

Saturday Night Live (1977-1980)

In 1975, an Off-Broadway version of a Lampoon show led to his first television role as a cast member of the ABC variety show Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. That same season, another variety show titled NBC's Saturday Night premiered. Cosell's show lasted just one season, canceled in early 1976. After working in Los Angeles with the "guerrilla video" commune TVTV on several projects, Murray rose to prominence in 1976. He officially joined the cast of NBC's Saturday Night Live for the show's second season, following the departure of Chevy Chase. Murray was with SNL for three seasons from 1977 to 1980.[citation needed] A Rutland Weekend Television sketch Monty Python’s Eric Idle brought for his appearance on SNL developed into the 1978 mockumentary All You Need Is Cash with Murray (alongside other SNL cast members) appearing as "Bill Murray the K", a send-up of New York radio host Murray the K, in a segment of the film that is a parody of the Maysles Brothers's documentary The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit. During the first few seasons of SNL, Murray was in a romantic relationship with fellow cast member Gilda Radner.

1980s: Work with Harold Ramis

Murray (right) with Paul Binder in 1989

Murray landed his first starring role with the film Meatballs in 1979. He followed this with a portrayal of Hunter S. Thompson in 1980's Where the Buffalo Roam. In the early 1980s, he collaborated with writer-director Harold Ramis and starred in a string of box-office hits, including Caddyshack (1980), Stripes (1981), and Tootsie (1982). Murray was the first guest on NBC's Late Night with David Letterman on February 1, 1982. He later appeared on the first episode of the Late Show with David Letterman on August 30, 1993, when the show moved to CBS. On January 31, 2012 – 30 years after his first appearance with Letterman – Murray appeared again on his talk show. He appeared as Letterman's final guest when the host retired on May 20, 2015.

Murray began work on a film adaptation of the novel The Razor's Edge. The film, which Murray co-wrote, was his first starring role in a drama film. He later agreed with Columbia Pictures to star in Ghostbusters—in a role originally written for John Belushi—to get financing for The Razor's Edge. Ghostbusters became the highest-grossing film of 1984 and, at the time, the highest-grossing comedy ever. The Razor's Edge, which was filmed before Ghostbusters was released, was a box-office flop.[citation needed]

Frustrated over the failure of The Razor's Edge, Murray stepped away from acting for four years to study philosophy and history at Sorbonne University, frequent the Cinémathèque in Paris, and to spend time with his family in their Hudson River Valley home. During that time, his second son, Luke, was born. With the exception of a cameo in the 1986 film Little Shop of Horrors, he made no film appearances, but participated in public readings in Manhattan organized by playwright-director Timothy Mayer and in a stage production of Bertolt Brecht's A Man's a Man. Murray returned to films with Scrooged in 1988 and Ghostbusters II in 1989.