Enduring screen team Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau join
Robert Osborne on the TCM set for a discussion of their
respective careers, including the 11 films they made together, in
Private Screenings: Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau
(1998). It all began in 1966's
The Fortune Cookie, when
director Billy Wilder cast Matthau in his first truly comedic film
role opposite Lemmon, who was already an Oscar® winner for
Mister Roberts (1955). Matthau won the Oscar® for Best
Supporting Actor for his performance in
The Fortune
Cookie as a crooked lawyer. It was the first of three movies
the pair would make for Billy Wilder --
The Front Page
(1974) and
Buddy Buddy (1981) would follow.
Lemmon and Matthau cemented their partnership in Neil
Simon's
The Odd Couple (1968), with Lemmon playing
neat freak Felix to Matthau's sloppy Oscar®. Thirty years later, a
sequel,
The Odd Couple II (1998) would again team
Lemmon and Matthau in their final film pairing. In between, there
were other memorable Lemmon-Matthau films, like
Grumpy
Old Men (1993) and its 1995 sequel.
BW & C-55m. Closed Captioning.
by Stephanie Thames
