Frederick Martin "Fred" MacMurray

 Frederick Martin "Fred" MacMurray (August 30, 1908 – November 5, 1991)

He appeared in more than 100 movies and a successful television series during a career that spanned nearly a half-century, from 1930 to the 1970s. MacMurray is well known for his role in the 1944 film noir Double Indemnity directed by Billy Wilder, in which he starred with Barbara Stanwyck. Later in his career, he became better known worldwide as Steve Douglas, the widowed patriarch on My Three Sons, which ran on ABC from 1960–1965 and then on CBS from 1965–1972. MacMurray worked with directors Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges and actors Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich and, in seven films, Claudette Colbert, beginning with The Gilded Lily (1935). He co-starred with Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams (1935), with Joan Crawford in Above Suspicion (1943), and with Carole Lombard in four films: Hands Across the Table (1935), The Princess Comes Across (1936), Swing High, Swing Low (1937), and True Confession (1937). MacMurray also played Jeff Sheldrake, a two-timing corporate executive in Wilder's Oscar-winning comedy The Apartment, (1960) with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon. In another turn in the "not so nice" category, MacMurray played the cynical, duplicitous Lieutenant Thomas Keefer in 1954's The Caine Mutiny.

MacMurray suffered from throat cancer in the late 1970s and it reappeared in 1987; he also suffered a severe stroke at Christmas 1988 which left his right side paralyzed and his speech affected, although with therapy he was able to make a 90% recovery. After suffering from leukemia for more than a decade, MacMurray died from pneumonia in November 1991, aged 83 in Santa Monica. He is interred at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, CA.