Fictional Actuaries - Actuaries in Film

Actuaries in Film

• Double Indemnity (1944) a Billy Wilder film, with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, was possibly the first to feature an actuary. The plot revolves around a murder that seeks to gain advantage from a rather peculiar insurance policy. An insurance investigator (Edward G. Robinson) knows the actuarial statistics and becomes suspicious.
• Are You With It? (1948) is musical comedy featuring Donald O'Connor as an actuary who is forced to join a carnival after misplacing a decimal point on a statistical table.
• Sweet Charity (1969) is a film that documents the romantic life of an actuary, played by John McMartin with Shirley MacLaine as his love interest.
• The Billion Dollar Bubble (1976) - the Equity Funding scandal retold in the form of a movie starring James Woods.
• Class Action (1991) - featured Gene Hackman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as father and daughter lawyers on opposite sides of a massive class action law suit. Actuarial analysis plays a key role in the outcome.
• Escape Clause (1996) - Andrew McCarthy plays Richard Ramsay in an actuarial thriller. To quote TVguide.com "The makers of this direct-to-video release thought the world was ready for a thriller about an insurance actuary. They thought wrong."
• Fight Club (1999) - Edward Norton plays the character Jack, who briefly describes in a scene aboard an airplane, that his job entails the assessment of risk associated with car accidents for an insurance company. Even though not explicitly stated, he performs the job of an underwriter who uses actuarially derived premiums to benchmark quotes.
• Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (2001) starring Matthew McConaughey - The lives of a lawyer, an actuary, a housecleaner, a professor, and the people around them intersect as they ponder order and happiness in the face of life's cold unpredictability.
• About Schmidt (2002) - Warren Schmidt is portrayed by Jack Nicholson. The movie mostly covers Schmidt's retirement from an insurance company, and his adventures after his retirement.
• Along Came Polly (2004) - Reuben Feffer (Ben Stiller) is a risk assessment expert, and though not explicitly stated, performs the job of an actuary.