From 1959 to 1973, MacMurray appeared in numerous Disney films, including The Shaggy Dog, The Absent-Minded Professor, Follow Me, Boys!, and The Happiest Millionaire.

[2] MacMurray attended school in Quincy, Illinois, where he played football and baseball, ran on the track team and worked in a local pea cannery.

[5] While there he found work as an extra and continued playing the saxophone with the California Collegians, a vaudeville group that was formed out of the pit orchestra at the Warner Brothers Hollywood Theatre.

The band was hired to appear on Broadway in Three's a Crowd (1930–31) with Fred Allen, Clifton Webb and Libby Holman, resulting in a move to New York City from California.

[7] MacMurray was offered a role in the production, leading to a further casting in the musical Roberta alongside Sydney Greenstreet and Bob Hope (1933–34).

Usually cast in light comedies as a decent, thoughtful character (The Trail of the Lonesome Pine), and in melodramas and musicals, MacMurray became one of the film industry's highest-paid actors of the period.

[14] Despite being typecast as a "nice guy", MacMurray often said his best roles were when he was cast against type, such as under the direction of Billy Wilder and Edward Dmytryk.

Perhaps his best known "bad guy" performance was that of Walter Neff, an insurance salesman who plots with a greedy wife to kill her husband in the film noir classic Double Indemnity.

[15] In another turn in the "not so nice" category, MacMurray played the cynical, duplicitous Lieutenant Thomas Keefer in Dmytryk's film The Caine Mutiny.

[16] Six years later, MacMurray played Jeff Sheldrake, a two-timing corporate executive in Wilder's Oscar-winning film The Apartment.

In 1958, he guest-starred in the premiere episode of NBC's Cimarron City Western series, with George Montgomery and John Smith.

MacMurray's career continued upward the following year, when he was cast as the father in the Disney film The Shaggy Dog.

Using his star-power clout, MacMurray had a provision in his My Three Sons contract that all of his scenes on that series were to be shot in two separate month-long production blocks and filmed first.

That condensed performance schedule provided him more free time to pursue his work in films, maintain his ranch in Northern California, and enjoy his favorite leisure activity, golf.

[17] Over the years, MacMurray became one of the wealthiest actors in the entertainment industry, primarily from wise real estate investments and from his "notorious frugality".

[19] MacMurray's final film was The Swarm, costarring Michael Caine, Olivia de Havilland and Henry Fonda.

[20] The actor, semi-retired at this point, was called back for one last film by director Irwin Allen entitled Fire!

At the 1,750-acre (710 ha) ranch, he raised prize-winning Aberdeen Angus cattle, cultivated prunes, apples, alfalfa and other crops, and enjoyed watercolor painting, fly fishing, and skeet shooting.

He stated that the myth of his wealth being in league with Doris Duke and the Aga Khan ($75 to $100 million range) stemmed from his life-long frugality.

Lamont and MacMurray met during the production of Roberta while in New York City while he was performing with the Collegians in 1934, and they quickly became an item.

[12] Parsons refers in a 1947 column that she and MacMurray made amends, "...we let our hair down about a lot of things...principally a misunderstanding that marred a long friendship, and then and there cleaned up all our grievances", possibly alluding to the columnist's attempts at career sabotage.

A life-long devout Catholic, she met with Pope Pius XII in 1951 and decided to follow her faith and join a convent.

[12] MacMurray stated in a 1954 interview that "June had a serious operation after she fell at Fox Studios a couple of years ago...and she's not sure if she will be able to have children".

[43] As a result of Haver's inability to conceive, in 1956 they adopted fraternal twins, Laurie Ann and Katie Marie, "right out of the incubator".

[15] Haver curtailed her Hollywood career after marrying MacMurray, with one final appearance on the Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour in 1958 as herself.

[46] MacMurray appeared onstage along with other conservative luminaries stumping for Thomas Dewey in the 1944 Presidential election, and he supported Ronald Reagan for Governor of California in 1966.

[49] MacMurray was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for The Absent-Minded Professor.