OKLAHOMA!

Murray is a big fan of this 1943 Broadway musical from the creative team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. He once told an interviewer that he rated Oklahoma! as “the best musical ever.”

See also Mame.

OLIVE KITTERIDGE

Continuing the transition into “sad old man” roles that began with St. Vincent, Murray plays a forlorn widower learning to love again in this 2014 HBO miniseries based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Elizabeth Strout. Frances McDormand stars as Olive Kitteridge, a crabby New England schoolteacher who enjoys an unlikely late-life romance with Murray’s character.

OSMOSIS JONES

DIRECTED BY: Tom Sito, Piet Kroon, and Peter and Robert Farrelly

WRITTEN BY: Marc Hyman

RELEASE DATE: August 10, 2001

FILM RATING: **½

MURRAY RATING: **

PLOT: A dyspeptic slob successfully fights off a bout of food poisoning.

STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Frank Detorri, gluttonous zookeeper

Murray reunited with the Farrelly brothers for this curious comedy mixing live-action with hand-drawn animation in the glorious tradition of Space Jam. Playing a slovenly widower who contracts a life-threatening virus after eating a tainted egg, Murray delivers the sweatiest, seediest, least appealing character turn of his career. Most of the action takes place inside his disease-ravaged body, where a cartoon buddy-cop duo voiced by Chris Rock and David Hyde-Pierce join forces to vanquish the killer germs trying to do him in. Bobby Farrelly called Osmosis Jones “the best script I’ve seen my whole time in the business,” and though that is more than a little hyperbolic, there are many clever moments here that evoke the golden age of Warner Bros. animation. As a twenty-minute educational short about the human digestive system, this film might have been a minor classic. At ninety-five minutes, the joke goes on far too long. The cartoon sequences are intermittently amusing, but the Farrelly-directed live-action inserts push the envelope of gross-out humor to its stomach-turning extreme. In two separate scenes, Murray disgorges himself all over the kindly schoolteacher played by Molly Shannon. Equally revolting is Chris Elliott, outfitted in an Edgar Winter fright wig, as Murray’s lackwit younger brother. This is not the Groundhog Day reunion moviegoers were expecting.

NEXT MOVIE: Speaking of Sex (2001)

OVITZ, MIKE

This legendary Hollywood talent agent represented Murray from the early 1980s until the mid-’90s. “He was my monster,” Murray once remarked of the Creative Artists Agency founder. “He was great. He’s a famous character, but he was my character. And when he’s on your side, he’s a weapon. He’s really something.” Murray has Ovitz to thank for the big-money studio deals that defined his career in the 1980s. “He did things that no one did before and made things happen,” Murray has said. In 1995, Ovitz left CAA to become president of the Walt Disney Company. Murray remained with the agency for another five years before firing his agents in 2000.