Jack Lemmon, who has died of cancer aged 76, was the most successful tragi-comedian of his age, and twice an Oscar winner.
He had one overriding ambition - to act - and confessed to being a workaholic who had no intention of retiring, remarking that he had never lost a total passion for his work. Indeed, the 1990s, the decade in which he turned 70, was the busiest of his life, with nearly 30 television and screen appearances.
He will best be remembered for his collaboration with his friend Walter Matthau in The Odd Couple, and for seven movies directed by Billy Wilder, five of them with Matthau, including The Fortune Cookie and The Front Page. For the same director, he paired memorably with Tony Curtis in Some Like it Hot.
Comedy dominated the early part of his career and, although he won his first Oscar, a supporting one, for his ebullient playing of Ensign Pulver in Mister Roberts, the second came for his performance as the corrupt businessman in Save The Tiger. Other major roles were in the ecological thriller, The China Syndrome, as an alcoholic in Days Of Wine And Roses, and as the distraught father in the political film, Missing.
Details of his awards, prizes and nominations would fill the rest of this appreciation, but he was especially proud of the American Film Institute lifetime achievement award he received in 1988, and the honorary golden bear he won at the Berlin international film festival in 1996.
Although Lemmon had to struggle for recognition early in his career, being born the only child of a wealthy Boston family cushioned him. His father was president of a baking company, specialising in doughnuts, which he claimed to have introduced into Britain. Lemmon had the distinction of being born in a lift, thanks to his mother's insistence on staying at the bridge table, rather than go to hospital.
As a boy he spent almost two of his first 12 years in hospital, but he was determined to become an actor. His father, who at one time had the same ambition, reluctantly allowed his son, after naval service and graduation from Harvard, to head for New York and fame - with just $300 in his pocket.
Unsurprisingly, the money ran out before Lemmon enjoyed success, and he moved into his father's Manhattan apartment and used his piano-playing talents to earn a living. But soon the heyday of live television gave him steady work, and he made hundreds of appearances between the late 1940s and his breakthrough to the big screen. He also got married in 1950, to Cynthia Stone, but later said he was too young and too busy to make a success of it, and they were divorced in 1956.
Lemmon had intended to be a stage actor, and did make it briefly to Broadway, but the lure of Hollywood - and a part opposite the great com- edian Judy Holliday - proved irresistible. He followed this 1954 debut, It Should Happen To You, directed by George Cukor, with another Holliday vehicle, Phffft! (also 1954). A year later, his big break came in the screen treatment of a Broadway hit, Mister Roberts, where his joyous performance as the young Ensign Pulver livened up a film that suffered from being stage-bound and at the mercy of three directors, one uncredited.
From then on, he seldom stopped working, notching up more than 70 starring roles, plus stage appearances, narrations, television specials and cameos. He also directed one feature, Kotch (1971), starring Matthau, and, via his own company, Jalem, co-produced many of his own movies, as well as the highly successful Cool Hand Luke (1967), starring Paul Newman. Although not especially active politically, except for giving campaign support to Democrats, including Senator Eugene McCarthy, he produced a series of short films on ecology, including The Slow Guillotine and Timetable For Disaster (1969-70).
A supporting role in the charming musical My Sister Eileen (1955) was the first of six collaborations with Richard Quine, who directed him in Operation Mad Ball (1957) and the dire Bell, Book And Candle (1958), among other comedies. Characteristically, Lemmon remained loyal to his friend, and, when Quine found it difficult getting work, used him to direct one of his short subjects, Plutonium: An Element Of Risk (1978), almost the last work by the director before his suicide.
That collaboration yielded minor works, but Lemmon's relationship with Wilder, beginning with Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960), was the stuff that cinematic dreams are made of. In the former, he and Curtis played out-of-work musicians who, after witnessing the St Valentine's Day Massacre, dragged-up as part of an all-girl band to avoid the gangsters. Lemmon claimed to have based his make-up and demeanour on his mother, whose keen humour was matched by her fondness for the bottle, to such an extent that she asked for her ashes to be strewn behind her favourite hotel bar.
In The Apartment, he played CC Baxter, a young man who ingratiates himself with his philandering bosses by letting them use his apartment for assignations. All goes well until one of them brings back the girl that CC himself longs for. This biting satire gave him the type of role Lemmon was to reprise, perhaps too often: that of a likeable man confused and pressured by circumstance.
This was the first indication of the mature Lemmon where, in Jonathan Miller's words, he displayed comedy "with an edge of seriousness". A couple of years later, such seriousness was profound in Blake Edwards's sombre Days Of Wine And Roses (1962), in which he was again a youngish guy at the mercy of his superiors in a San Francisco PR company. He drinks socially, then, increasingly, with his wife, until they are full-blown alcoholics. The couple, harrowingly played by Lemmon and Lee Remick, attempt to retain normality, but destruction follows.
Arguably Edwards's best movie, it began a collaboration that led, in 1965, to Lemmon and Curtis reuniting in The Great Race. This broad comedy - the costliest in the genre to that date - has great moments, with Curtis lighter and more fun than his co-star, who was more suited to the subsequent The Fortune Cookie (1966). In Wilder's satirical comedy, Lemmon took the weaker role and Matthau gained an Oscar for his brilliant portrayal of the conniving brother-in-law. The duo also had great fun with The Odd Couple (1968). Sadly, they were to make The Odd Couple II 30 years later, a film that had none of the vivacity of the stagey original.
During the early 1970s, Lemmon's run of good fortune continued. His only directorial effort, Kotch, was widely praised, and he was his usual frenetic self in Wilder's Avanti! (1972), playing a naive American who goes to Italy to bury his father, and grows up during the farcical process. He was to receive his second Oscar, for best actor, the following year for his intense performance as a businessman resorting to arson to avoid bankruptcy. From an opening scene in Save the Tiger (1973), when he looks in the shaving mirror and laments the cost of maintaining his lifestyle, Lemmon displays a blend of vulnerability and arrogance, typical of his gallery of misfits.
Although there had been duds along the way, Lemmon's screen career had been remarkably successful, and he was enormously popular with the public and his peers. He commanded $1m a film, plus a share of often-substantial profits. But he was to give increasingly mannered performances in the next years, partly to compensate for weaker films - even from Wilder - including The Front Page (1974) and Buddy, Buddy (1981). He found himself stressed and drinking too much, which led to a fine for drink driving in 1976. He finally gave up alcohol in the early 1980s, and gradually cut out his huge cigarette consumption in favour of cigars, then, later, a comforting pipe.
The decade yielded him few decent movies, however, and he even appeared as the pilot in the pot-boiler, Airport '77, and a poor reworking of John Osborne's The Entertainer (1976) for television. Only the gripping China Syndrome (1979), dealing with his pet concern of ecology, proved a great commercial and critical success. He did, however, make many television specials, including a programme about his favourite composer, Gershwin, and a tribute to his friend Ernie Kovacs.
In 1979, Lemmon returned successfully to the stage in Tribute, playing a publicist, who, discovering that he is terminally ill, desperately tries to re-connect with his estranged wife and son. It was subsequently filmed but, despite plaudits, including a silver bear at Berlin in 1981, still seems intensely theatrical on screen.
There were better movies to follow, though, notably Costa-Gavras's Missing (1982), in which Lemmon is a father desperately searching for his son, who has disappeared in Chile during the Pinochet coup. The film was critical of the regime - and of American support there - but Lemmon also saw it as a portrait of an ordinary family man in deep crisis.
In Mass Appeal (1984), he was a priest trying to help a young homosexual with his faith and, the next year, proved, even working opposite Marcello Mastroianni, that nothing could save soggy Macaroni. Then he starred in an intriguing failure, That's Life, cast in the semi-autobiographical role of his close friend, Blake Edwards. The film, about an architect going through a mid-life crisis, was part written by Edwards's psychiatrist, and co-starred the director's wife Julie Andrews, with Lemmon's actress wife, Felicia Farr, as the seductress. His son Chris was also in the movie, shot largely at Edwards's home. It proved a box-office disaster.
In an effort to stretch himself after that, Lemmon embarked on his most taxing stage role - playing James Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill`s Long Day's Journey Into Night. He starred on Broadway, on tour and - importantly for Lemmon - made his London debut in the piece, directed by Jonathan Miller. They subsequently filmed it for television.
As the years progressed, Lemmon became increasingly active, happy to take character roles, including a 78-year-old in Dad (1989), a telling cameo as Jack Martin, in Oliver Stone's controversial JFK (1991), and the lacerating role in David Mamet's ensemble work, Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). His performance as the pitiful Shelley Levene was unequalled in his later career.
Lemmon's favourite pastimes were golf, pool and the piano, and he got to use the last in Robert Altman's The Player (1992). His musical talents had led him to record an album, A Twist of Lemon, and to compose themes for two of his films, Fire Down Below (1957) and Tribute. After the cameo role, Altman cast him in Short Cuts (1993) and, the same year, he received good reviews for a mini-series, A Life In The Theatre, and turned in a commercial hit - with Matthau - in Grumpy Old Men (1993). They followed it with The Grass Harp (1995), an adaptation of a Truman Capote novel, directed by Matthau's son Charles. Their penultimate work together was Grumpier Old Men (also 1995).
Lemmon was in front of the cameras four times during 1996, though to little effect. Getting Away With Murder was dismal and, as Marcellus, in Kenneth Branagh's ponderous Hamlet, he was worthy of a golden turkey award. Happily, however, the remainder of the decade offered 10 screen appearances to expunge that memory, two of which were in decent television remakes of classics.
He played the contentious juror in Reginald Rose's revised version of his own 12 Angry Men (1997). Two years later, he won his third Golden Globe - from a total of 12 nominations - for the screen treatment of the play, Inherit the Wind. Directed by veteran Daniel Petrie, whose son, Donald, had made a hit of Grumpy Old Men, it offered Lemmon and George C Scott barnstorming parts as opposing lawyers at the infamous 1925 court case about the teaching of evolution.
Lemmon's last appearances were on a smaller scale, including a voiceover in The Legend Of Bagger Vance last year, and a series of documentary appearances. He hosted The Living Century, a movie about the lives of ordinary people. There was another work about George Cukor, and, most appropriately, he appeared in the AFI's celebratory 100 years, 100 Laughs - America's Funniest Movies.
Lemmon is survived by his wife Felicia, their daughter Courtney, and son Chris from his first marriage.
John 'Jack' Uhler Lemmon, actor, born February 8 1925; died June 28 2001
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