His death came almost exactly a year after that of his great friend and screen partner, Walter Matthau, with whom he acted in 10 films. Matthau once described Lemmon as “a clean-cut, well-scrubbed Boston choirboy with quiet hysteria creeping out of every pore.” His gift was evident in his first film, the 1954 George Cukor comedy “It Should Happen to You” with Judy Holliday. Lemmon’s instinct was to act with every bone and muscle in his eloquent body–a gift his favorite director, Billy Wilder, relished. “There is so much talent,” Wilder said, “you are tempted to use it every second. He can drag you with him like a runaway horse. You have to ration him. I squeeze that Lemmon sparingly.” And got from him, in the sublime “Some Like It Hot,” one of the supreme comic turns in Hollywood history, as the flapper-era jazz musician Jerry, who masquerades as a woman to stay alive–and starts to enjoy it.
The son of a doughnut-company executive, Lemmon had a privileged East Coast upbringing, graduating from Phillips Andover Academy and Harvard. In cutthroat Hollywood, he was known for his graciousness, diligence and class. “That’s the nicest actor we’ve ever had on the lot,” claimed Columbia’s tough-as-nails mogul Harry Cohn, who signed him to his first contract. Matthau called him “the most egoless actor in Hollywood.” There was never a hint of scandal attached to his name. He married his second wife, actress Felicia Farr, in 1962, and they were together nearly 40 years.
Lemmon made his mark as a funnyman, winning his first Oscar in 1955 for his supporting role as the cocky Ensign Pulver in “Mister Roberts.” But he revealed the dark side of his frazzled comic persona in his harrowing performance as an alcoholic in “Days of Wine and Roses” (1962). He won his second Oscar as the bitter, corrupt businessman Harry Stoner in the 1973 “Save the Tiger” and did some of his best later work in such heavy-duty dramas as “The China Syndrome” and “Missing.” If there were moments, late in the game, when self-pity leaked into his persona, the public never seemed to mind. He found scores of new admirers in the fifth decade of his career in the wildly popular “Grumpy Old Men” series with his pal Matthau. By that point he had won just about every award there was to be won.
“Nobody’s perfect,” says Joe E. Brown to Lemmon in the last scene of “Some Like It Hot,” when Lemmon whips off his wig to reveal to the smitten Brown that he’s a man. Harried, insecure, striving, Lemmon’s characters were defined by their imperfection. He was the middle link in a classic line of flawed, jittery, funny/sad American boy-men that stretched from Jimmy Stewart to Lemmon to Tom Hanks. His characters were never larger than life. He was a Quixote of the quotidian, helping us to laugh at our powerlessness, our daylight nightmares, our less than heroic ambitions, while showing us just how far we could bend without ever truly breaking. He was the movies’ moral Elastic Man, a unique construction of blood, sweat and Silly Putty.
