If you ever had the great opportunity to visit the set of a Jack Lemmon movie, the first thing you’d notice is that before every take he would say “it’s magic time.” And he was right. He brought magic to audiences around the world for nearly 50 years.
Lemmon, who died in 2001 at the of 76, starred in over 60 films, earning eight Oscar nominations, winning for supporting actor for 1955’s Mister Roberts and lead actor for 1973’s Save the Tiger, receiving six Golden Globes including the honorary Cecil B. DeMille Award, three BAFTA’s and two Emmy Awards. Lemmon was also the recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award and the Kennedy Center Honors.
He was something of an anomaly when he made his film debut in George Cukor’s 1954 comedy It Should Happen to You opposite Oscar-winner Judy Holliday. That classic kicks off a trio of Lemmon comedies on TCM on Sept. 2
Remember, it was the decade of the Method - populated with such rebels without a cause as Marlon Brando, James Dean, Monty Clift, Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. Lemmon was much more in the traditional leading man vein. It’s hard to imagine him in a torn t-shirt and denim jeans screaming “Stella!”
At least in the first five years of his career, Lemmon was the affable everyman with a spot-on comedic sensibility. A year after his debut, Lemmon managed to steal Mister Roberts from such heavyweight veterans as Henry Fonda, James Cagney and William Powell, winning the Oscar for his performance as Ensign Pulver, the laundry and morale officer of a World War II cargo ship.
The Harvard educated actor who studied with the legendary Uta Hagen at HB Studio in New York was a familiar face on television before he made It Should Happen to You. He turned on the charm opposite an ingenue by the name of Eva Marie Saint in the lovely 1949 Studio One production of “June Moon.” And for three months in 1952, Lemmon and his first wife Cynthia Stone starred in the live CBS sitcom Heaven for Betsy, which aired for 15 minutes twice a week.
In 1953, he made his Broadway debut in the revival of the comedy “Room Service.” Though the production quickly closed, Lemmon was seen by a Columbia talent scout who brought to the despotic studio head Harry Cohn, who wanted to change his name to Jack Lennon. Since it was the height of the Hollywood blacklist, Lemmon pointed out to Cohn that people would think that he was related to the Soviet Union’s Vladimir Lenin and thus a Communist. Lemmon was able to keep his name.
Lemmon received a rave from the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther for It Should Happen to You, with the critic noting that the actor had a “warm and appealing personality. The screen should see more of him.” Lemmon is delightful in the appealing romantic comedy as a fledgling documentary filmmaker who meets a young woman (Judy Holliday) in Central Park obsessed with becoming famous. The Lemmon/Holliday chemistry was so winning Columbia quicky put them together that same year in the underrated Phfft.
Lemmon loved working with Holliday. “She was intelligent and not at all like the dumb blonde she so often depicted. She didn’t give a damn where the camera was placed, how she was made to look or about being a star. She just played the scene-acted with, not at. She was also one of the nicest people I ever met.”
Though Columbia did cast him the 1957 drama Fire Down Below with Robert Mitchum and Rita Hayworth and portrayed Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth in the 1956 TV production of “The Day Lincoln Was Shot,” Lemmon was quickly typecast as a comic actor. And his brilliant comedic Oscar-nominated performance in Billy Wilder’s 1959 gender-bender masterpiece Some Like It Hot just solidified his reputation.
“I really can’t be funny unless it’s part of the character,” Lemmon once lamented. “It really bugs me when someone thinks of me as a comic. If I read ‘comedian Jack Lemmon,’ I gag. That means I’m not an actor-which I am.”
Still, he did have a great sense of humor. He became good friends with celebrated comedian Ernie Kovacs and was often a member of the eccentric comic’s Nairobi Trio. And his gravestone at the Westwood Village Memorial Park reads “Jack Lemmon In.”
His son Chris Lemmon told the L.A. Times in 2014 that his father admired French actor Jean-Louis Barrault, best known as the mime Baptiste in Marcel Carné’s transcendent 1945 epic Children of Paradise because of his “ability to make them laugh and break their hearts at the same time—that is what he wanted to do.”
And it was Wilder who gave Lemmon that opportunity with 1960’s multi-Oscar-winning dramedy “The Apartment.” The actor received his second-best actor Oscar nomination for his deft performance as a young man working in a dead-end job at a large insurance company who takes a walk on the seamy side to climb the corporate ladder. He was never typecast again as a strictly funny man.
The fourth of seven Lemmon/Wilder collaborations, 1966’s The Fortune Cookie marked the first of ten films Lemmon made with Walter Matthau.
(Lemmon also directed Matthau in 1971’s Kotch.)
“Walter is a helluva actor,” Lemmon said. “The best I’ve ever worked with.”
The Fortune Cookie finds Lemmon playing a divorced CBS cameraman who is injured by a Cleveland Browns’ football player during a game. Matthau received a supporting actor Oscar as his brother-in-law, a shyster lawyer who convinces Lemmon to go along with his scheme that he is partially paralyzed do to the injury. Matthau wants to milk a cool million out of the insurance company. At least it wasn’t a double indemnity!
The Lemmon evening ends with 1975’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue, which Neil Simon adapted from his hit 1971 play. It was Lemmon’s third collaboration with Simon having starred with Matthau in the hit 1968 adaptation of The Odd Couple and in 1970’s The Out-of-Towners.
Lemmon and Anne Bancroft handle Simon’s rat-a-tat one liners with aplomb. They play middle-class empty nesters living in a cramped New York apartment that is falling apart. Lemmon’s nerves are also fraying. He can’t sleep. It’s too hot. The stewardesses next door are too loud. When Lemmon is fired from his job, he loses his purpose in life and suffers a breakdown.
Reviews were mixed, though, the New York Times stated Lemmon and Bancroft “project forcefully natural characterizations that are as realistic as the authentic Second Avenue and other New York sites caught by the color cameras.”
Lemmon told the L.A Times in 1992 that it was always easy for him to exercise his comedic muscles after doing a series of dramatic films. “Several times in my career, I have literally waited over a year and not worked because I’m waiting for something specific,” he said. “You begin to think, ‘Have you forgotten how to act? Will I be able to act? Is it gone?’ But the minute you start again, it is there.”
The actor remembered a conversation he had with his mother when he and his second wife Felicia Farr returned to Los Angeles after getting married in Paris where he was filming Wilder’s 1963 Irma La Douce.
“She had been separated from my dad since I was 18, so to all intents and purposes, she was single,” he noted. “She said, ‘By God, I think I will get married again. If I do, he is going to be very young, very tall and he is going to be about 210 pounds without an ounce of fat. He is going to look like an Adonis, and he is going to be a wild man. I said, ‘My God. Do you think you can handle something like that?’ Without batting an eyelash she said, ‘Hell, yes. It comes back to you just like swimming.’”
“And,” Lemmon noted, “it is the same with comedy.”
