Word: murrayism
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...Bill performed in high school musicals and sang lead in a cover band, the Dutch Masters. ("I thought the name would look good painted on a drumhead," he explains.) Like several of his brothers, he caddied at the Indian Hill Golf Club to help pay his Catholic-school tuition. (Murray's father Edward, a lumber salesman, died in 1967 at age 46 of complications from diabetes; his mother Lucille, a mailroom clerk, died in 1988 of cancer.) It was while caddying that Murray developed his ferocious sense of justice. "As a poor kid carrying a rich guy's bag," says...
...Murray grew up in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, Ill., the fifth of nine children. Three of his brothers are actors, and a sister Nancy, a Dominican nun, tours the world in a one-woman show as St. Catherine of Sienna. "Bill had to learn how to get attention just to survive," says Murray's older brother, veteran character actor Brian Doyle-Murray. (Doyle-Murray took their grandmother's maiden name because there was already a Brian Murray in Actors' Equity.) "Obviously, he survived...
Other friends of Murray's speak in similar tones, like jilted lovers angling for the chance to be jilted again. "Getting him to read the script for the [as yet unmade] second sequel to Ghostbusters--I don't think he's ever read it, actually," says Dan Aykroyd, one of Murray's fellow Ghostbusters and oldest friends. "He makes business so difficult that I just relate to him as a friend now. I have...
...knows Murray doubts his essential goodness. ("He'll do anything for anyone when the chips are down," says Aykroyd.) But the cost of his artistic and personal freedom is a kind of eternal vigilance. He is clearly one of the most willful people on earth, but he is also talented enough to make that seem like a trivial flaw. "As a moviegoer, when you see him, you know you're in the hands of someone who has a set of values that he won't veer away from," says Michaels. "It inspires a lot of trust. Plus...
After graduation, Murray briefly studied pre-med at Regis College in Denver before running out of money, drifting back to Chicago and landing at the improvisational comedy troupe Second City, where his gifts for performance and his nascent moral code merged into the beginnings of the person he is today. "He had a very special talent," recalls Josephine Forsberg, Murray's first improv teacher. "He could project the good part of himself, the part that is optimistic and charming, onto an audience. His darker side he'd show in private, but never onstage. But what I really loved about Billy...