Word: murray
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...sometimes scary to watch. Murray was known to go into the audience and rough up customers he felt were not paying proper respect to his fellow actors. "At Second City we were taught that the audience were these wild electrons out there," says Murray. "It was important to please them, but we also had to control them. I mean, when you're actors on a stage, it's you against the world. It's not the audience's show. It's yours...
After he was hired to replace Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live, Murray made a name for himself with affectionate renderings of sleazeball characters like Nick, the world's ickiest lounge singer. (His greatest hit was a rendition of the Star Wars theme: "Starrrr Wars! Nothing but Starrrr Wars! Gimme those Starrrr Wars! Don't let them end!") And, as usual, he took it upon himself to stand up for the rest of the cast. When Chase returned to be host of the show in its third season, Murray decked him when tension between Chase and regular cast members came...
...Murray left Saturday Night Live in 1980 to become a star in Stripes and a phenomenon in Ghostbusters, movies in which he improvised much of his dialogue. Summarizing these early performances, film critic Pauline Kael wrote that Murray's "patent insincerity makes him the perfect emblematic hero for the stoned era." For a man who wanted to be emblematic of nothing and beholden to no one, Murray must have sensed that he was losing control of what he was trying to project. So, he had agreed to do Ghostbusters only if the studio, Columbia, would finance a remake...
Following The Razor's Edge, Murray basically took four years off. He studied French at the Sorbonne, traveled extensively and turned down lots of easy money. He was very happy. "A lot of us work in whatever we can and let the locusts come in and clean our bones," says Aykroyd. "Billy's different. He's off on another kind of journey that people, including me, don't always understand...
...Murray does not like to talk about career plans or personal growth--"Are you trying to make me gag?" he asks--but in the early '90s it became obvious that he was charting a new course and evolving as an actor. "Groundhog Day was a transitional movie," says Ramis. As weatherman Phil Connors, Murray was doomed to relive the same day until he got it right, in the process evolving from a surly (but funny) egoist into a sweet (slightly less funny) human being. "In that role he actually got at the edge between the better, higher, gentler Bill...