Bill Murray

Info

Full Name: William James Murray
Date of birth: September 21, 1950 (75 years old)
Location: Evanston, Illinois
Country: USA
Height: 1,88m

Bill Murray has been active for 43 years, participating in 54 movies that average a 6.8/10 score.

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Tráiler en VOSE de 'Harry Potter' T1

Biography

Bill Murray's career in comedy began, oddly enough, with an arrest. On his 20th birthday he was stopped at Chicago's O'Hare airport carrying several pounds of marijuana, having joked to a fellow passenger that there were bombs in his luggage. The bust ended his premed studies in Denver and sent him home, where he followed his older brother Brian Doyle-Murray into Second City, the city's famous improv school.

Born in Evanston, Illinois, on 21 September 1950, William James Murray grew up in nearby Wilmette, the fifth of nine children in an Irish Catholic household. His father, a lumber salesman, died when Bill was 17, and he paid his fees at a Jesuit school by caddying at a local golf club, the start of a lifelong obsession. Another brother, Joel Murray, became an actor too.

'Saturday Night Live' and the Ghostbusters years

Murray joined 'Saturday Night Live' in January 1977 with the thankless job of replacing Chevy Chase, and even traded punches with him backstage when Chase returned to host. The audience came round all the same, he won an Emmy as part of the writing team, and Hollywood soon called: 'Meatballs', 'Caddyshack' and 'Stripes' were three hits in a row, topped up with an uncredited turn in 'Tootsie'.

Then came 'Ghostbusters'. Peter Venkman, written for him by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis and directed by Ivan Reitman, made the 1984 film the highest grossing comedy the box office had ever seen and made Murray a superstar alongside Sigourney Weaver. He'd only signed on in exchange for the studio funding 'The Razor's Edge', his cherished Somerset Maugham adaptation. When it flopped, he vanished for four years and studied philosophy and history at the Sorbonne in Paris.

He came back as a heartless TV executive in 'Scrooged', a modern spin on Dickens's 'A Christmas Carol', reunited with the team for 'Ghostbusters 2', directed the caper 'Quick Change' with Howard Franklin, his only film behind the camera, and struck gold again with 'What About Bob?'. Then, in 1993, 'Groundhog Day' arrived: now one of the best loved comedies ever made, though the shoot was so fraught that he and Ramis didn't speak for over two decades. They made peace shortly before the director's death in 2014.

Wes Anderson's lucky charm

His second act began with a script by a young Texan named Wes Anderson. Murray liked 'Rushmore' so much that he played the depressed tycoon Herman Blume for union scale, swept the American critics' awards and found the collaborator of his life. He has since appeared in ten Anderson films, among them 'The Royal Tenenbaums', 'Life aquatic', 'The Darjeeling Limited', 'Moonrise Kingdom' and 'The Grand Budapest Hotel'.

He voiced the badger in 'The Fantastic Mr. Fox', Anderson's stop motion Roald Dahl adaptation, returned for 'Isle of Dogs' and 'The French Dispatch', and in 'The Phoenician Scheme' received his most exalted casting yet: God himself, welcoming the tycoon played by Benicio Del Toro to the afterlife.

A BAFTA for 'Lost in Translation'

Sofia Coppola wrote 'Lost in Translation' for Murray and nobody else, then spent months leaving messages on the voicemail he famously uses instead of an agent. He never signed a contract, and Coppola only relaxed when he landed in Tokyo. His fading film star Bob Harris, adrift in a hotel bar with Scarlett Johansson, earned him the BAFTA for Best Actor, a Golden Globe and his only Oscar nomination, lost to Sean Penn on the night.

That voicemail has cost him dearly over the years: offers for 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' and 'Monsters, Inc.' simply never reached him in time. It has also kept him free to wander: he searched for a possible son in 'Broken Flowers', directed by Jim Jarmusch, played Franklin D. Roosevelt hosting George VI in 'Hyde Park on Hudson' and was the grumpy Brooklyn neighbour of 'St. Vincent'.

In 2015 he finally won an acting Emmy for the miniseries 'Olive Kitteridge', alongside Frances McDormand, beating Damian Lewis of 'Wolf Hall' to the prize without even turning up to collect it. A year later the Kennedy Center handed him the Mark Twain Prize, America's top comedy honour, and in 2020 he reunited with Coppola on 'On the Rocks' with Rashida Jones, adding another Golden Globe nomination.

He has never stopped poking fun at his own myth. He voiced 'Garfield', later joking that he'd mixed up its screenwriter Joel Cohen with Joel Coen, sang 'The Bare Necessities' as Baloo in 'The Jungle Book' and played himself as a zombie in a beloved 'Zombieland' cameo, expiring with the words 'Garfield, maybe'. He has kept the Venkman flame alive in 'Ghostbusters: Afterlife' and 'Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire', and made a late Marvel debut in 'Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania'.

Golf, baseball and six sons

Murray was married to Margaret Kelly from 1981 to 1996 and to Jennifer Butler from 1997 to 2008, and has six sons. The best known is Luke, a basketball coach who helped UConn to back to back national titles in 2023 and 2024, with his father weeping happily in the stands, before being named head coach at Boston College in March 2026.

Golf is the other great love. He is a fixture at the celebrity tournament at Pebble Beach, winning it in 2011 as the amateur partner of pro D.A. Points, and runs a Caddyshack restaurant in Florida with his brothers. He also owns stakes in several minor league baseball clubs, among them the Charleston RiverDogs, where his official job title is Director of Fun. And then there are the stories: decades of gatecrashed weddings, parties and karaoke nights, collected in the documentary 'The Bill Murray Stories: Life Lessons Learned from a Mythical Man'.

The myth took a knock in 2022, when 'Being Mortal', a film directed by Aziz Ansari, was shut down for good after a complaint about his behaviour on set. Murray paid a settlement and has spoken since about his regret over the incident.

At 75 he keeps rolling. In 2025 he starred opposite Naomi Watts and a scene stealing Great Dane in 'The Friend', played God for Anderson and turned up for the 50th anniversary special of 'Saturday Night Live'. And at a Louvre screening in July 2026 he lobbied Anderson in public for a western, arguing that a Texan owes the world a cowboy movie. Few would bet against him getting his way.