Bill Murray names the best performance in cinema history: “Some of the greatest acting I’d ever seen”
Some actors grow up dreaming of performing on stage and screen, others find their way into it by accident, and more than a few, including Bill Murray, immediately realise where their futures lay by watching a movie or performance that changes everything.
Before turning his attention toward the performing arts, he wasn’t really sure what he wanted to do with his life. Murray briefly attended university, but dropped out, and on his 20th birthday, he was arrested at a Chicago airport for attempting to smuggle cannabis into the city, so his prospects weren’t great.
Fortunately, his brother, Brian Doyle-Murray, invited him to try his luck at Chicago’s famed Second City comedy troupe, and when he moved to New York City to pursue his newfound dream, he was hand-picked by John Belushi to appear on The National Lampoon Radio Hour, which led him directly to Saturday Night Live and everything else that’s followed in the last 50 years.
He didn’t wake up one day and decide that acting was his true calling, but neither is that a million miles away from the truth. All it took was an Academy Award-winning performance in a ‘Best Picture’-winning film, which also happens to be John Wayne’s all-time favourite, and Murray knew what he wanted to do.
“Someone I thought who was really great was Paul Scofield, when he played Thomas [More],” Murray explained, referencing Fred Zinnemann’s 1966 historical drama, A Man for All Seasons, as the actor who delivered a performance that convinced him that he could at least try and follow in their footsteps.
“I thought that was some of the greatest acting I’d ever seen,” he continued. “I thought, there was a man who was going through absolutely all the questions of life and death, what he was going to make the meaning of his life about. He doubled down on whatever he thought to be the meaning of his purpose on earth.”
A surprisingly profound answer from an actor and comic who made their name on SNL before mastering their signature style of acerbic, dry, and impassive delivery on the silver screen. A British period piece about a knight of the realm refusing to lean on the Pope to try to annul the marriage between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon doesn’t sound very Murray-esque, but Scofield’s work was inspirational.
In more ways than one, too; he didn’t only cite it as the performance that influenced his chosen career path, but he also suggested that he’s been subliminally imitating the protagonist ever since. “And that’s accidentally what’s happened to me,” he added. “That I’ve tried to make that my life, too.”
A six-time Oscar-winning 16th-century drama may not leap out as the kind of thing that would provide a formative, pivotal, and life-altering moment for somebody who achieved fame, stardom, and fortune through making people laugh, but without A Man for All Seasons, there wouldn’t be a Bill Murray as audiences have come to know, love, and loathe in equal measure.
