Bill Murray
Bill Murray is an actor, born 1950.
Bill Murray is an American actor and comedian known for deadpan delivery in roles ranging from studio comedies to independent dramas. He has a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe, two Primetime Emmy Awards and an Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead, plus a nomination for an Academy Award, and he received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2016.
The early persona was contempt as a comic engine. Carl Spackler in Caddyshack, John Winger in Stripes, Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters (1984): men who cannot be impressed by anything, including the plot they are standing in. Venkman treats a citywide supernatural emergency mainly as an opportunity to flirt, and the film is funnier for having a lead who is not remotely worried. Scrooged, Kingpin and Ed Wood all run variations on the same unimpressed man.
Groundhog Day (1993) is the hinge. Same smirk, but the film converts it into a moral problem and makes Murray play the exhaustion underneath, and he does it without ever going soft. From there he became the preferred instrument of directors who wanted sadness sitting under a joke. Wes Anderson has used him repeatedly, from Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums through The Life Aquatic, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel and The French Dispatch, and his single Academy Award nomination came out of this stretch. The late career splits between that work, sincere small films like St. Vincent and Broken Flowers, and a long joke where he plays himself, in Zombieland, Space Jam and Coffee and Cigarettes.
Movies (83)
- Meatballs (1979)
- The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
- Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)
- The Jungle Book (2016)
- Ghostbusters (1984)
- Groundhog Day (1993)
- Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024)
- Charlie's Angels (2000)
- Lost in Translation (2003)
- Zombieland (2009)
- Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
- Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)
- The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
- Garfield (2004)
- Isle of Dogs (2018)
- Space Jam (1996)
- Wild Things (1998)
- Get Smart (2008)
- Ghostbusters (2016)
- Ghostbusters II (1989)
- Dumb and Dumber To (2014)
- The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun (2021)
- Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)
- The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
- Caddyshack (1980)
- Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006)
- City of Ember (2008)
- Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
- Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
- St. Vincent (2014)
TV (8)
Where to start with Bill Murray
Groundhog Day is the whole argument for him in one film. It is a broad studio comedy that happens to be about despair, and Murray is the only actor who could have kept both halves upright at once.
Lost in Translation is the companion piece and the fullest version of the melancholy: very little happens, and it is the performance most people mean when they say he became a serious actor.
Work backwards to Ghostbusters for the original persona at full strength, then to Rushmore, the film that started the Wes Anderson partnership and gave him his first properly wounded character. The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou continue it, the second being the one where he is the lead rather than the decoration. Broken Flowers and St. Vincent are the quieter late films, and both are better than their reputations.
The eighties comedies
The run that made him a star, built on a delivery nobody else had: bored, improvised, faintly contemptuous of the film he is standing in. Caddyshack is barely a performance and is still quoted forty years later. Scrooged is the strangest of them.
Groundhog Day and the transition
The early nineties, where the comedy starts carrying something heavier underneath it. Groundhog Day is the film the whole career gets measured by and its reputation has only grown. Quick Change is the one he co-directed and almost nobody saw.
The Wes Anderson films
Rushmore rebuilt him as a dramatic actor and he has appeared in nearly every Anderson film since. The Life Aquatic gives him the most to carry, and it is the saddest thing either of them has made.
The dramatic and independent work
Lost in Translation is the Oscar nomination and the least mannered performance of his career. Broken Flowers runs the same register for Jim Jarmusch and is nearly as good. St. Vincent is the late crowd-pleaser.