Long before he was Peter Venkman or Phil Connors, Bill Murray was a Chicago-area kid carrying golf bags to pay his school tuition. Later he headed to Colorado with a plan to study medicine, and that plan lasted about as long as a groundhog’s patience on a movie set. We will get to that bite in a moment.
Murray turned 76 on September 21, 2026, and he is still very much with us. In August he even showed up unannounced at a Massachusetts movie marathon of his own films. Away from the cameras, he is the father of six sons, and while two of them have stepped into public life in very different ways, the other four have stayed out of it entirely. Here is what we know about each of them, and which son now runs his own team in one of college basketball’s biggest conferences.
How Did A Pre-Med Student Become Bill Murray?
William James Murray was born on September 21, 1950, in Evanston, Illinois, into a big Irish Catholic family with eight siblings. According to Wikipedia and the TCM film database, the Murray brothers worked as golf caddies as teenagers, and Bill’s caddy money helped pay his tuition at Loyola Academy, a Jesuit high school in Wilmette.
After graduation he enrolled at Regis, a Jesuit college in Denver, and signed up for pre-medical courses. It did not take. According to Wikipedia and the South Carolina Encyclopedia, he left quickly and went back to Illinois, and Regis clearly did not hold it against him, because in 2007 the school awarded him an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree.
Back home, his older brother Brian Doyle-Murray helped open the door to Chicago’s Second City improv troupe, and from there it was on to New York. Murray joined Saturday Night Live in its second season and won an Emmy as part of its writing staff. Those caddy years paid off again in 1980, when Brian co-wrote Caddyshack. ESPN and TCM both report that the film grew out of the brothers’ days caddying at Indian Hill Club in Winnetka.
The hits kept coming after that. Ghostbusters became the highest-grossing film of 1984, Lost in Translation earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, and his work with Wes Anderson reached ten films with 2025’s The Phoenician Scheme.
When someone at that August 2026 screening asked why he kept acting, Murray gave the crowd a very Bill Murray answer. “Turns out, I have no other skills so I went back to movies,” he said, as Boston.com reported. One of those movies left him with a scar.
Did The Groundhog Really Bite Bill Murray?
Yes, it did, and twice. Groundhog Day was filmed in 1992 in Woodstock, Illinois, which stood in for Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, and in several scenes Murray had to hold the animal himself. That included the famous sequence where Phil kidnaps the groundhog and takes it for a drive.
Murray told the whole story on the YouTube interview show Hot Ones in March 2025, while he was promoting his film Riff Raff. “He got me back-to-back, two days in a row,” he said, according to NBC Chicago. By day two he had tried to protect himself. “I put some fisherman’s gloves underneath the gloves I was wearing,” he said. “His teeth went right through the steel.”
He held up his finger to show host Sean Evans the scar, and then came the punch line. The handlers had admitted the groundhog was never trained. “We caught him just over by that field two weeks ago,” they told him. We covered the full tale in Bill Murray Had No Idea The Groundhog In His Hit Movie Was Wild.
By the time Groundhog Day opened in 1993, Murray was already the father of two boys, and four more were still to come.
Who Are Bill Murray’s Six Sons?
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He married his first wife, Margaret Kelly, on January 25, 1981, while he was filming Stripes. According to Wikipedia and People, the couple had two sons, Homer and Luke, before they divorced in 1996.
A year later, in 1997, Murray married Jennifer Butler, and they had four sons together: Caleb, Jackson, Cooper and Lincoln. That marriage ended in 2008. Butler, a costume designer, died in January 2021 at 57, and the Post and Courier remembered her as a fiercely loyal mother to her four boys.
Murray has rarely spoken about fatherhood in any detail, but he did open up in a 2012 interview with Esquire, as both People and Cheat Sheet have noted. “As much as the divorce was very hard, the fallout of it has been really great,” he said. “I ended up much closer to my guys than I ever would have been.”
Caleb, Jackson, Cooper and Lincoln have kept their lives private. None of them has given interviews about their father, and the family has not shared details about their work or personal lives, so we are respecting that here. The two oldest boys are a different story, and one of them got his start in a kitchen.
What Does Homer Murray Do Now?
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That would be Homer, the oldest, who was born on March 3, 1982, and is now 44. He became a chef and restaurateur in Brooklyn, and according to InsideHook and BrooklynVegan, he spent years cooking at the Roebling Tea Room in Williamsburg before going into business for himself.
Around 2013 he helped open River Styx, a neighborhood spot in Greenpoint that became known for its fancy nachos. In August 2016, Homer and his business partner, Syd Silver, closed River Styx and reopened the space as 21 Greenpoint, which Time Out New York described as a more upscale seasonal restaurant. Both Time Out and Hospitality Design reported that chef Sean Telo was running the kitchen.
Dad pitched in for the launch. In September 2016, Bill Murray tended bar at 21 Greenpoint on a Friday and Saturday night, according to CBS News and Time Out. The shifts were meant for a guest list of friends and family, but Homer told Eater the public could still try their luck. “People can walk in; just be nice,” he said.
Two years later, the restaurant marked River Styx’s fifth anniversary by bringing the old nachos back for one night, according to the neighborhood site Greenpointers. Otherwise, Homer has stayed out of the spotlight, which is more than can be said for his younger brother, who has spent the last decade on national television every March.
Which Of Bill Murray’s Sons Is A College Basketball Coach?
Luke Murray was born on April 1, 1985, and he is 41. He graduated from Fairfield University in 2007, and that same year he started his coaching career at Quinnipiac.
From there he worked his way up as an assistant, with stops at Wagner, Towson, Rhode Island, Xavier and Louisville. At Wagner and Rhode Island he worked for Dan Hurley, and in 2021 Hurley brought him to UConn.
Luke has always been clear that he is not trying to be his father. “We’re different people, and I think [he] probably likes it that way,” he told USA Today Sports in 2017, as People reported. He proved the point in 2016, when Xavier made the NCAA Tournament and Luke confessed to ESPN’s Jeff Goodman that he had never watched Caddyshack, the movie his dad starred in and his uncle co-wrote. “I’ve heard it’s good, [but] I’ve never seen it,” he said, according to Golf Channel and GolfWRX.
At UConn, Luke became the offensive coordinator, and the Huskies won back-to-back national championships in 2023 and 2024 with Bill in the stands both times. After the 2024 title game, cameras caught father and son hugging on the court, as ABC News and Entertainment Tonight reported. During the 2023 run, Bill sounded like any proud dad when he told a Big East reporter, “I’m very proud of this boy, he’s a wonderful kid and he’s worked very hard,” according to People.
All that hard work led to the biggest job of Luke’s career.
Where Is Luke Murray Coaching Now?
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On March 26, 2026, Boston College hired Luke as the 14th head coach in the history of its men’s basketball program, his first head coaching job. According to the Associated Press and Wikipedia, he replaced Earl Grant. The Eagles play in the Atlantic Coast Conference, and they have not made the NCAA Tournament since the 2008 to 2009 season.
He did not leave UConn right away, though. Luke stayed with the Huskies through the 2026 tournament, and Bill was in the crowd when UConn came back to beat Duke in the Elite Eight, as Fox News and Newsweek reported. The Huskies then beat Illinois in the Final Four before losing the national title game to Michigan, 69 to 63, according to NBC Sports. Boston College introduced Luke as its new coach at a press conference on March 31.
What he found waiting was a roster he had to build almost from scratch. “In my BC email, which I had no understanding of how to access, there were 12 notifications of guys going in the portal,” he told the Boston Globe in September. “At the time, it felt daunting.”
Now his first season at Boston College is about to tip off, and he is aiming for the tournament itself. “That’s absolutely our goal,” he told the Globe. “A goal less than that is probably not worth having.” If the Eagles get there, expect a familiar face in the crowd. The former pre-med student never finished college, but he has made a habit of showing up for his son’s biggest games.
