Walter Matthau

--"One of the funniest men I've ever worked with and [he] didn't understand anything about the movie at all." (Don Siegel, who directed Matthau in 1973's Charley Varrick)

--"Watching Mr. Matthau, as his wife awaits on the other side of the door, trying to pull pantyhose onto the rubbery form of a very drunk hooker, is one of the more cheerful moments of the entire movie season." (Critic Vincent Canby on California Suite, 1978)

--"Lemmon...tells of a time Matthau was almost killed shooting a scene [during the filming of 1981's Buddy Buddy]. He was set to go down a laundry chute, but the mattresses weren't set right and he went headlong down 12 or more feet and crashed. Lemmon said he got to him first and all he could hear were moans. 'I put my coat under his head and tried to keep his head straight... Then I asked him, "Are you comfortable?"' Lemmon said Matthau stopped moaning, looked up at him and said, 'I make a living.'" (New York Daily News, 1983)

--"He's grown slouchier, scrawnier, clumsier, more singular with age, until he at last resembles a giant grumpy question mark with a three-pack-a-day habit, flecks of pastrami in his teeth and really bad clothes. To watch him motivate from one side of the room to the other is both an adventure and a discovery." (The Washington Post on Matthau in one of his and Lemmon's numerous post-Grumpy Old Men comeback films, 1997's Out to Sea)

--"Matthau has himself been very ill, and could no doubt have drawn on that experience for enough cries and whispers to furnish a Bergman movie. But he's read the script and understands it and doesn't embarrass himself by providing more authenticity than the material can carry." (Roger Ebert on the actor's final role, in this year's Hanging Up)

--"Walter Matthau, the foghorn-voiced master of crotchety comedy who won an Oscar for The Fortune Cookie and cemented his stardom as the sloppy Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple, died Saturday of a heart attack. He was 79." (AP report, July 1, 2000)