LEMMON, John Uhler, III ("Jack")

(b. 8 February 1925 in Newton, Massachusetts; d. 27 June 2001 in Los Angeles, California), two-time Academy Award–winning actor who often portrayed ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances.

Lemmon was born in an elevator between the fifth and sixth floors of the Wellesley-Newton Hospital, when his mother, Mildred LaRue Noel, refused to leave a game of bridge in which she felt she had a winning hand. His father was John Uhler Lemmon, Jr., the general sales manager and vice president of the Doughnut Corporation of America. Both of Lemmon's parents enjoyed singing and soft-shoe dancing. They placed their only child, when he was four years old, in a local production of There's Gold in Them Thar Hills. His theatrical debut included only one line—"Ha, I hear a pistol shot!"

Shy and sickly, Lemmon had missed a full year of schooling by the age of eight. When a friend could not appear in a school play, he put on his friend's oversized cowboy hat and cape and went on for him. The cheers and laughter of his schoolmates, he later recalled, "hooked me on acting," and it quickly became a "lifelong passion." He took up running and his health improved. At thirteen he was sent to the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he taught himself to play the piano and entertained friends with comedy routines. Though he wanted to study drama at Yale, his father prevailed on him to take business classes at Harvard University, beginning in 1943.

Lemmon chronically cut classes to involve himself in the Hasty Pudding Theater Club, a Harvard theatrical troupe. Eventually he was elected its president. Placed on academic probation, he was billed as "Timothy Orange" so that he could appear in his own production, The Bottom's Fallen Out of Everything but You. In 1945 Lemmon was commissioned an ensign in the U.S. Navy, and spent seven months as a communications officer on the U.S.S. Champlain, an aircraft carrier. He graduated from Harvard in 1947 and on $300 borrowed from his father went to New York City. There he performed on radio soap operas and, between 1948 and 1952, on television. He costarred with the actress Cynthia Stone in four short-lived series, and the two were married on 7 May 1950.

Lemmon was offered a contract with Columbia after being spotted by a talent scout in the 1953 Broadway revival of Room Service. He began his film career opposite Judy Holliday in It Should Happen to You! (1954). The following year he won an Oscar for his portrayal of Ensign Pulver in Mister Roberts. Fans and critics considered Lemmon a comedian, but he objected. Although he wanted to play in dramas, Columbia would not consider the idea. His Oscar-nominated work in drag for the director Billy Wilder's hugely successful Some Like It Hot (1959) seemed to seal his fate in screen comedy.

Lemmon was not altogether satisfied with his success as he entered the 1960s. His marriage to Stone (which had produced a son, Christopher) ended in divorce in 1956. The actor sought more meaningful material and found it in The Apartment (1960), Wilder's wickedly perceptive take on corporate life in America. Lemmon's C. C. Baxter is a middle-management employee of an insurance company who "gets ahead" when bosses borrow his apartment for extramarital affairs. The film, along with Wilder's script and direction, all won Oscars, and Lemmon was nominated as best actor. Wilder thought Lemmon "the most consummate and appealing actor since the early Charlie Chaplin." Most actors, he told interviewers, "can show you one or two things and they've emptied their shelves. Jack Lemmon is Macy's and Tiffany's and the Sears and Roebuck Catalogue." Lemmon thought Wilder "grew a rose in a garbage pail" by showing the possibility of true love in "the age of the aspirin."

Lemmon hoped to deepen the impression that he was ready for dramatic roles by returning to Broadway in Face of a Hero (1960). He received good notices, but the play closed after only four weeks. Back at Columbia, The Wackiest Ship in the Army (1961) and The Notorious Landlady (1962), his third film with Kim Novak, confirmed Lemmon's status as a top-ten box office draw but did little to challenge him or his audience.

For nearly two years he and the director Blake Edwards had been trying to interest a Hollywood studio in J. P. Miller's Days of Wine and Roses (1962), the tragic tale of a public relations man and his wife, whose lives are destroyed by alcoholism. Warner Brothers reluctantly agreed to make the picture on a small budget. The results were an award-winning film that catapulted Lemmon into the first rank of Hollywood stars. His performance as Joe Clay, who tears up a greenhouse in a drunken rage and loses his mind while strait-jacketed in a detoxification center, shocked audiences and thrilled critics. The New Yorker found Lemmon's performance a revelation, alternately "dazzling, funny, anguished, indignant, rueful, affectionate and cruel." A critic in the Saturday Review expressed the hope that the film would help Hollywood realize that "Lemmon is not only one of our ablest young comedians, but actually one of the screen's finest all-around performers."

Lemmon reteamed with Wilder for Irma La Douce (1963), and while filming in France in 1962 married his long-time love, actress Felicia Farr. They had one daughter, Courtney. Lemmon sped through two well-received but unremarkable comedies—Under the Yum Yum Tree (1963) and Good Neighbor Sam (1964)—to complete his contract with Columbia. Now able to finally freelance, he was at first uncharacteristically cautious. Roles as the harried husband in How to Murder Your Wife (1965) and the evil professor in Edwards's The Great Race (1965) did little to enlarge or diminish his reputation.

His next film for Wilder, however, quickly became a fan favorite. In The Fortune Cookie (1966) Lemmon is television cameraman Harry Hinkle, who fakes an injury while covering a football game in order to collect a quarter-million dollars in insurance money. His former brother-inlaw, "Whiplash" Willie Gingrich, supremely played by Walter Matthau, is behind the fraud and the fun. When Matthau suffered a heart attack midway through the production, Lemmon and Wilder shut the film down and awaited his return. The result was an Academy Award for Matthau and the birth of one of the funniest teams in Hollywood history.

The Odd Couple (1968), Lemmon's and Matthau's next collaboration, and their most memorable, was based on Neil Simon's stage play that starred Matthau and Art Carney. Lemmon solidified his screen persona as the over-wrought everyman with his performance as Felix Ungar. Matthau's finely tuned Oscar Madison, the casually indifferent, endlessly sloppy sports writer, was equally unforgettable. The plot involves two fast friends, one divorced and the other about to be, who put civility to the test when they try living together in Madison's mid-Manhattan apartment. Critics and fans found the results riotous. The scene of Lemmon loudly clearing his sinuses as a bewildered Matthau looks on is a comedy classic, as is a shouting match between Felix and Oscar that finally finishes when a sticky plate of spaghetti is hurled against a wall.

The admiration between the two stars was immediate, deep, and permanent. Matthau observed that "Lemmon's characters allow us to see the world through the eyes of someone we know, someone he hints we may even be." Lemmon loved Matthau's improvisational quality that unexpectedly enriched scenes from take to take. The two actors fed off one another in transcending their material. Lemmon said, "When Walter and I really get it going there's three stars in the picture—me, Walter and the two of us together." Simon believed the contradiction of their characters made them particularly appealing. Their relationship "is like a marriage," he noted. "They fight but the audience knows they want to hold on to one another. The way Jack and Walter play it—the love shows through."

Lemmon's next Neil Simon character became a cult classic, even though critics are still divided as to whether The Out-of-Towners (1970) is worthy of all the excitement. The story follows the tortured path of George and Gwen Kellerman from their quiet suburban home in Dayton, Ohio, to their nightmare encounter with New York City. What follows is a survey of all that had gone wrong with the American city of the 1960s. Their plane is rerouted, their luggage lost, and their train's dining car is closed. They finally arrive during a downpour. There is a transportation strike and a sanitation strike, and their hotel reservation is lost. They are mugged, thrown out of church, and even have their last cracker-jack box taken from them, but only after George chips a front tooth on a nut. At its release, New York critics were nearly unanimous in deriding Simon's "excruciating" script and Lemmon's "stupidly stubborn" character. What the New York Times called "witlessly uncomfortable," the New York Daily News described as "desperately hilarious." Simon saw Lemmon's "complete conviction" capturing "the common man's battle against what modern living puts upon him." He is pushed beyond what would seem endurable but refuses to surrender. That is why Lemmon was "my voice and the voice of many" in his battle with modernity. "He played the character like an instrument," Simon said, "and made it into a Stradivarius."

Lemmon directed Matthau in Kotch (1971), the largely successful, if highly sentimental, story of a garrulous old man who is a nuisance to his son and daughter-in-law. Save the Tiger (1973) was his Oscar-winning account of Harry Stoner, a middle-aged dress manufacturer who sets fire to his factory. Behind the act is a formerly decent man in indecent times who comforts himself in the rationalization, "it's only arson if you're caught." For Lemmon the part was an opportunity "to go beyond entertainment in making people stop and think what they would not have thought had they not seen the film." In his twentieth year in films, he had come to see that as "a great gift."

The quarter-century that followed affirmed Lemmon's rank as a star of the first magnitude whose characters, in Lemmon's view, "had to make a fundamental choice" between doing what they knew to be right or what was expedient, even when virtue came at a considerable cost. Roles included that of Mel, an out-of-work executive who remembers every insult and is brutalized by affluence, in Simon's The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975); Jack Godell, the nuclear engineer who stands alone, risking his own career, when he senses that unsafe conditions might lead to a meltdown, in The China Syndrome (1979); and Ed Horman, who in Missing (1982) takes on the American government in seeking the whereabouts of his son, who disappeared in a Chilean coup surreptitiously backed by Washington. A decade later he played Sheldon "the Machine" Levene, a pathetic real-estate salesman in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). His reunion with Matthau in Grumpy Old Men (1993) was a box office bonanza and led to a string of Lemmon-Matthau collaborations, among them Grumpier Old Men (1995) and The Old Couple II (1998).

Lemmon was a long-time friend of liberal causes, particularly the environment. A number of younger actors, including Kevin Spacey, Alec Baldwin, and Matthew Broderick, all said that no one had been more helpful to them than Lemmon. Shortly before his death of complications from cancer, Lemmon said that his acting had long been shaped by the French writer Albert Camus's idea that "if man understood the enigma of life there would be no need for the arts." When Lemmon died, headlines heralded the passing of the "American Everyman," the great landscape painter of cinema's second half-century, whose brush-strokes captured the striving, uncertain success and ultimate sadness of postmodern man.

Biographies of Lemmon include Don Widener, Lemmon: A Biography (1975); Will Holtzman, Jack Lemmon (1977); Michael Freedland, Jack Lemmon (1985); and Joe Baltake, Jack Lemmon: His Films and Career (1986). Major articles include Joe Baltake, "Jack Lemmon Has the Potential to Succeed Bob Hope or Fredric March," Films in Review (Jan. 1970). Obituaries are in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times (both 29 June 2001).

Bruce J. Evensen