Matthew Broderick

Matthew Broderick (born March 21, 1962, Manhattan, New York, U.S.) is an American actor best known for playing the title character in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) and for performing in such stage hits as The Producers (2001). He also gave Tony Award-winning performances in the Broadway shows Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983) and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1995).

Early life and first stage roles

Broderick was born to parents James Broderick, a screen and stage actor who starred in such TV series as Brenner (1959–64) and Family (1976–80), and Patricia Broderick (née Biow), a playwright and painter. Matthew Broderick grew up in Greenwich Village in New York, the youngest of three siblings, with two sisters, Martha and Janet. He studied acting at the Walden School on the Upper West Side, where, as he later observed to The Guardian, performing in high-school plays helped him overcome his shyness. He said, “Acting was a way of expressing my clown self. And then because I was getting this positive reinforcement, it made me more comfortable being my real self after the show. The more acting I did, the more I came out of my shell.” At age 17 Broderick landed a role in a workshop production of On Valentine’s Day alongside his father. The play was one of Horton Foote’s series of nine about life in rural Texas.

Early roles

In 1981 Broderick performed in the Off-Broadway production of Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, in which he played the adopted gay son of a drag queen. In a review that year The New York Times wrote, “Matthew Broderick brings a naturalness and a spontaneity to the role of the teen-ager.” The next year he had a breakout role in the Neil Simon play Brighton Beach Memoirs, for which he won a Tony for best featured actor in a play. Broderick’s success that year, however, was tempered by his father’s death of cancer at age 55. Broderick told The New York Times in 1983 that “he never got to see any of [my success].”

In 1983 Broderick appeared in his first movie, Max Dugan Returns, and then starred in the 1983 Cold War thriller WarGames, as a teenage computer hacker whose shenanigans nearly set off World War III. He also appeared in Simon’s Broadway play Biloxi Blues (1985) and assumed the role of Brother in two film adaptations of Foote’s plays 1918 (1985) and On Valentine’s Day (1986).

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and 1987 car accident

Broderick had his biggest success to date with the 1986 release of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in which he played a truant high-schooler who embarks on what is arguably the best sick day ever recorded. The movie was a hit and an immediate classic. It was also notable for the lead character’s “breaking of the fourth wall,” in which Broderick looks straight into the camera and talks directly to the viewer. Broderick soon began to date actress Jennifer Grey, who played his elder sister in the movie. Once again, however, Broderick’s success was mixed with misfortune when in 1987 the up-and-coming actors were involved in a fatal car crash while on vacation in Ireland. Driving at night, Broderick drove his rented BMW into oncoming traffic and hit another car. The crash killed the driver and passenger, Anna Gallagher and her mother, Margaret Doherty, respectively. Grey suffered minor injuries, but Broderick was seriously injured and spent weeks recovering in an Ireland hospital. He told authorities that he had no memory of the accident and paid a $175 fine after pleading guilty to careless driving. Decades later, the son and brother of the victims, Martin Doherty, said that he had forgiven Broderick.

Roles from the late 1980s and early ’90s and marriage to Sarah Jessica Parker

Broderick finished the decade with roles in movies such as the thriller Project X (1987) and the Civil War drama Glory (1989), about Robert Gould Shaw, who commanded the first all-Black volunteer military company in the U.S. He also starred in film adaptations of Biloxi Blues (1988) and Torch Song Trilogy (1988). The 1990s, he told The Guardian, were a struggle. “People associated me with younger roles, but I wanted them to come with me and get used to the fact that I’m wrinkly. And it was hard.” Broderick nonetheless worked steadily, lending his voice to adult Simba in Disney’s popular animated feature The Lion King (1994), starring alongside Jim Carrey in the dark comedy The Cable Guy (1996), and opposite Meg Ryan in the rom-com Addicted to Love (1997). He also played Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman in Infinity (1996), for which his mother cowrote the script. Meanwhile, in 1991 Broderick met Sarah Jessica Parker through her brothers, Pippin Parker and Toby Parker, who were founding members of the Naked Angels theater company in New York City. Parker and Broderick began dating and later appeared together in the Broadway show How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Broderick, in fact, had already ended his run in the show by the time Parker joined in 1996 but returned so that he could act alongside her. For his role, he won a Tony for best actor in a musical. The couple married in 1997 and went on to have a son, James Wilke (born in 2002 and named for Broderick’s father), and twin daughters Marion and Tabitha (born in 2009 via surrogate).

The Producers and roles from the late 1990s and early 2000s

Broderick’s movie roles from the late 1990s include a scientist in Godzilla (1998), an American retelling of the 1954 Japanese horror film of the same name, and the title character in Inspector Gadget (1999), a live-action film based on the 1980s animated series. He had a particularly memorable role as a high-school teacher in the 1999 movie Election opposite Reese Witherspoon’s overachieving student. In the early 2000s Broderick also appeared in You Can Count on Me (2000), The Stepford Wives (2004), and Strangers with Candy (2005).

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On Broadway Broderick starred in the thriller Night Must Fall (1999), the comedy Taller Than a Dwarf (2000), and the musical The Producers (2001) alongside Nathan Lane. The latter was Mel Brooks’s stage adaptation of his 1968 film about a crooked Broadway producer who partners with an accountant to stage what he hopes will be the least successful musical of all time, Springtime for Hitler. The Producers was a huge hit with critics and audiences, winning a record 12 Tony Awards, one of which had costars Lane and Broderick competing for best actor (Lane won). The musical was adapted into a major motion picture in 2005 with the original stars plus Uma Thurman and Will Ferrell. That same year Broderick reteamed with Lane in a Broadway revival of Simon’s The Odd Couple.

Later career

In the ensuing years Broderick continued to balance screen roles with stage parts. He performed in such plays as The Philanthropist (2009), Nice Work if You Can Get It (2012), It’s Only a Play (2014), Sylvia (2015), and Celebrity Biography (2018), while appearing in movies that included Then She Found Me (2007), Tower Heist (2011), Trainwreck (2015), and Manchester by the Sea (2016). In 2022 he and Parker memorably starred in a revival of Simon’s Plaza Suite, in which three stories of romance are acted out in a guest suite at the Plaza Hotel. The following year Broderick played Richard Sackler in the Netflix miniseries Painkiller. Based on real-life events, the series follows the Sackler family and their pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma as they develop and sell the highly addictive drug OxyContin, which has been blamed for the deadly opioid crisis in the United States.