Biographie

When offered the job as the dad on My Three Sons (1960), he was given a dream contract in which he only had to work 65 days a year on the series. The supporting cast, as a result, often had to shoot their scenes opposite a prop person off camera instead of Fred. The popular series ran 12 seasons.

In 1961 he took his family to Disneyland, and a woman came up to him and asked, "Are you Fred MacMurray?". When he replied that he was, she hit him with her purse and told him she had taken her children to see him in La garçonnière (1960) and was furious because "that was not a Disney movie!". He responded, "No, ma'am, it wasn't." He then turned to his wife and announced he was done playing bad guys in movies.

He and wife June Haver were once offered a husband-and-wife sitcom but Fred refused, afraid of putting his marriage in jeopardy by the pressures.

According to daughter Kate, he and wife June Haver were introduced to each other by John Wayne.

Cartoonist C.C. Beck claimed that he modeled his 1940s superhero Captain Marvel after MacMurray.

I once asked Barbara Stanwyck the secret of acting. She said, "Just be truthful - and if you can fake that you've got it made".

Carole Lombard was a wonderful girl. Swore like a man. Other women try, but she really did.

The two films I did with Billy Wilder, Assurance sur la mort (1944) and the La garçonnière (1960), are the only two parts I did in my entire career that required any acting.

[on working with director Preston Sturges] At the end of this shoot, he said, "It's been a pleasure working with you" and I said, "I wish I could say the same about you." I don't like to be that way, but he was terrible, very cruel.

[on Barbara Stanwyck] I was lucky enough to make four pictures with Barbara. In the first I turned her in, in the second I killed her, in the third I left her for another woman and in the fourth I pushed her over a waterfall. The one thing all these pictures had in common was that I fell in love with Barbara Stanwyck -- and I did, too.