Fred MacMurray

For over four decades, actor Fred MacMurray embodied the Everyman in a string of popular comedies and musicals, including "Remember the Night" (1940) and "The Egg and I" (1947) as well as a series of well-loved Disney live-action films like "The Absent-Minded Professor" (1961) and the long-running family series "My Three Sons" (ABC/CBS, 1960-1972). A handsome, affable presence, he made an ideal onscreen romantic partner to some of Hollywood's biggest female stars, including Claudette Colbert and Carole Lombard. So believable was MacMurray as upstanding young men that it seemed unlikely that he could play anything else, a notion that was dispelled by his chilly turn as a doomed murderer in Billy Wilder's "Double Indemnity" (1944). He proved equally successful in portraying the dark flipside to the Everyman, seduced by the lure of power, prestige and sex in "The Caine Mutiny" (1953) and Wilder's "The Apartment" (1960), though by the early 1960s, his status as America's favorite father figure was essentially complete. And if his versatility was often overshadowed by the vast number of audience-friendly pictures to his name, Fred MacMurray remained one of the screen's most likable personalities for decades, even long after his death in 1991.