Walter Matthau

Sitting pool side at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, Walter Matthau is being stubborn as a photographer tries to snap his photo. "Could you take your sunglasses off?," the photographer asks, referring to the plastic surf shades that seem as unfitting on the loose-fitting lines of Matthau's lugubrious face as would a mustache on Mona Lisa. "It's better with the glasses. Everybody knows that," he says wryly, his baritone voice dipping several octaves to emphasize his point. "Movie star. Hollywood.

Q: Jerry Stiller appeared with what Oscar-winning actor in 1974's "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" A: Walter Matthau

Oscar- and Tony-winner Walter Matthau returns as the rumpled but savvy lawyer Harmon Cobb in Sunday's CBS movie "Incident in a Small Town." Matthau introduced the character four years ago in the Emmy Award-winning "The Incident," in which Cobb defended a German POW in a murder trial during World War II. The second in the series, "Against Her Will: An Incident in Baltimore," aired two years ago. Veteran character actor Harry Morgan, best known as Col.

Wednesday is Great American Grump Out day. For the jolly, it can be a downer. Or not. Sean "Big & Loud" Conklin, a retired circus clown who lives in L.A., welcomes it. "For me, it's a day off," he says cheerfully. And an excuse to watch the movies of Walter Matthau, at right. First among these is "The Odd Couple," in which Matthau's cranky Oscar roomed with Jack Lemmon's finicky Felix. Later, Matthau was a grouchy lothario in "Grumpy Old Men" and "Grumpier Old Men," also with Lemmon.

Carol Matthau, a former actress and writer who married famously three times -- twice to author and playwright William Saroyan and once to actor Walter Matthau -- died Sunday of a brain aneurysm at her home in Manhattan. She was 78. She was married to the celebrated comic actor for 41 years until his death in 2000 at age 79. Her first marriage to Saroyan in 1943 lasted six years; her second, in 1951, lasted six months.

While a makeup woman touches up a razor scratch on his cheek, Walter Matthau leans over and whispers in Jack Lemmon's ear: "This time I'm gonna say 'No-Neck O'Brien.' " The old troupers are filming a scene from "Out to Sea," a comedy in which Matthau, the consummate con man, cajoles his pal into joining him on a Caribbean cruise ship comfortably stocked with free booze and rich old women.

In the Red Room of a sprawling Pacific Palisades mansion, pianist Antoinette Perry sits at a shiny red baby grand, conferring on the intricacies of Mozart's Concerto in A with host Walter Matthau, who for inspiration sports a yellow cap embroidered with the insignia "Mozart." Matthau, who has had no formal musical training--he cannot read music--is preparing for a performance Saturday night at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre.

There is evidence, so far not much more conspicuous than a touch of silver in the hair, that the major studios have begun to realize what anyone could have told them years ago: There's a huge movie audience waiting to be tapped. These viewers are well north of that roughly 16-to-20-year-old, primarily male demographic that the industry has been seducing so relentlessly for decades and now seduces more expensively than ever because the same fare finds even more customers abroad than at home.

Q: Jerry Stiller appeared with what Oscar-winning actor in 1974's "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" A: Walter Matthau

Now known as "the 'Bad Santa' guys," writers John Requa and Glenn Ficarra have been working together since the late '80s, including a stint writing cartoons for the Nickelodeon network. Their work on the remake of "The Bad News Bears" unites the two strands of their career: one writing family-friendly fare such as "Cats & Dogs" and the other writing much bawdier, more subversive scripts such as the notoriously foul-mouthed "Bad Santa."

Carol Matthau, a former actress and writer who married famously three times -- twice to author and playwright William Saroyan and once to actor Walter Matthau -- died Sunday of a brain aneurysm at her home in Manhattan. She was 78. She was married to the celebrated comic actor for 41 years until his death in 2000 at age 79. Her first marriage to Saroyan in 1943 lasted six years; her second, in 1951, lasted six months.

PEOPLE Heche Returns to the Set: Actress Anne Heche reportedly flew to a film set in Canada on Monday morning after a weekend in which she was briefly hospitalized after wandering up to the door of a rural home outside Fresno, appearing shaken and confused. On Saturday, it was announced that Heche, 31, had split with Ellen DeGeneres, 43, her companion for the last 3 1/2 years.

The funeral for Walter Matthau was short and sweet, witnessed by immediate family and a few adoring friends. An ambulance took him to a Santa Monica hospital late on the last night of June, and the burial came a couple of sunrises later, on a Sunday, for a towering figure of the stage and screen with the posture of a question mark.

Walter Matthau gained fame and fortune playing curmudgeons and grumpy old men (obituary, July 2), but off screen he was nothing like that, as literally thousands of his neighbors in Pacific Palisades can attest. With a history of heart problems, Matthau had been ordered by doctors to give up his compulsive gambling and three-packs-a-day cigarette habit and to get some serious exercise. He obeyed all except the first. For years, on almost any day and in any weather, when he wasn't shooting a movie, the Palisades was treated to the sight of a major Hollywood star trudging mile after mile in battered sneakers, drooping black socks and baggy shorts revealing spindly legs and knobby knees--accompanied, fittingly enough, only by a shaggy old sheep dog. Just about everybody recognized the star and the pooch and, feeling none of the awe or intimidation inspired by most celebrities, many would call out as if to an old friend, "How you doing, Walter?"

The strange and wondrous paradox of the star system is that we go to see stars we want to see on the screen and then pretend we don't know them. It was Cap'n Ahab, not Gregory Peck, dying in his quest for Moby Dick, and it was Cody Jarrett about to blow sky high on top of the refinery tank in "White Heat," not Jimmy Cagney; it was not even Frank Sinatra as the doomed soldier in "From Here to Eternity."

Calling for Mr. Matthau: Academy Award-winning actor Walter Matthau, often cast in beleagured, irascible roles, will take on those characteristics once again to star as Mr. Wilson in a new Warner Bros. screen version of "Dennis the Menace." Filming is set to begin this summer, the studio said Monday. No other casting was announced.

Piper Laurie lights up the screen as the shy and gentle Dolly Talbo in Charles Matthau's loving 1995 film, from the Truman Capote novella. Dolly and her younger sister Verena (Sissy Spacek, pictured) are spinsters living in a small Southern town in 1935 when they take in their recently orphaned 11-year-old cousin Colin (Grayson Fricke), later played by Edward Furlong. No two sisters could be more different. With Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon and Roddy McDowall (Cinemax Saturday at 8 p.m.).

Walter Matthau, the lovably grumpy comic actor with the hangdog face and gruff voice, died Saturday at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica. He was 79. Matthau was brought into the hospital in full cardiac arrest, a St. John's spokeswoman said, and died at 1:42 a.m. One of the few actors in Hollywood to successfully move from supporting roles as heavies and ethnic types to leading man, Matthau excelled at both comedy and drama in his career of more than 50 years.

"That face!" Diane Keaton exclaims. "It's a great face. It's beautiful!" What is it about Walter Matthau's face? It's curmudgeonly. It's gruff. He seems to have been born looking old. Who in movies had a face like Matthau when he started out in the '50s? Who looked like that and still got the girl? It was an unlovely face. Still is. It's what the term "hang dog" means. But who can look at him now, sad-eyed and grumpy, and say that his face isn't adorable? Heartbreakingly so.