The tragi-comic appeal of Jack Lemmon, one of Hollywood’s most underrated stars

It was the 12th or 13th take of a scene in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) and Jack Lemmon was getting irritated with his co-star Al Pacino. Pacino liked to riff away and experiment with alternative approaches. Lemmon was word-perfect and precise. The actors were both giving superb performances, but their techniques were radically different.  

As Pacino started over on the scene yet again, the film’s director James Foley heard Lemmon mutter under his breath: “F***ing method.”  

Lemmon, Foley tells The Independent, was humble and hard working. He had none of the airs and graces you might expect from an actor of his achievements. If Lemmon had been asked to audition for his part, Foley is sure he would have done so.  

Although Lemmon was no prima donna, the director soon realised he had foibles of his own. Between shots, when the filmmakers were changing the lighting and the set was at its most clamorous, the actor would come out to rehearse on his own.  

“You would find Jack standing in the middle of all that chaos with his eyes closed, mumbling," Foley says. "I’d ask him, ‘What are you doing?’ He said he wanted to go over his lines for the next scene and he wanted to do it on the set with that noise because he knew that was how you had to act in movies. It was not sitting in your trailer where it is calmly quiet.”  

It would be stretching it to suggest that Lemmon (1925-2001) was neglected during his lifetime or is forgotten now. He won two Oscars and his best films remain in circulation. Nonetheless, he is still woefully undervalued. When critics are talking about heavyweight actors in post-war Hollywood, he is seldom part of the conversation – and the reason almost certainly is that he wasn’t “method” enough.  

Lemmon’s big screen career began in the mid-1950s at around the same time as those of James Dean and Marlon Brando. However, he was Mr Middle America. You simply can’t imagine the dapper Harvard graduate as a motorbike riding gang member in a film like Brando’s The Wild One (1953) or as a tormented delinquent, similar to Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Lemmon was too clean cut to play counter-culture types. He was too self-effacing, too urbane, too much the character actor, to star as the alpha male in cowboy films or thrillers.  

Lemmon is back on TV screens over Christmas in Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot (1959). The much-loved film, in which he is in drag for almost the entire running time, features one of the most famous endings in Hollywood history. Jerry/Daphne (Lemmon) tries to explain to his besotted suitor, millionaire Osgood Fielding (Joe E Brown), just why they can never marry. He is too bulky to fit in Osgood’s mother’s wedding dress; he’s not a natural blonde; he smokes; he has a terrible past; he can never have children. Osgood smiles serenely, waving aside every objection. Exasperated, Lemmon rips off the wig from his head and blurts out that he’s a man. “Nobody’s perfect,” Osgood blithely replies and the credits soon roll.  

It’s a perfect example of the Lemmon “curse” in action. In any given film, audiences almost always take his side. That may be why they underestimate him. He’s such a genial and engaging figure that they can’t see the darkness behind his smile. Nor do they notice his versatility. Like Osgood, they refuse to reject him even when he begs them to do so. He may play sleazy, dishonest or dysfunctional types (for example his office worker/pimp in The Apartment) but those traits never stick to him.  

IAL Diamond, Billy Wilder’s screenwriting partner, expressed it best when he called Lemmon “a prototypical American… immensely likeable. When he gets in trouble – let’s say as an alcoholic in Days of Wine and Roses – we’re rooting for him to get cured.”  

“I don’t think I’ve ever known a more natural actor, a more brilliant comedy performer,” George Cukor, who directed Lemmon opposite Judy Holliday in his breakthrough film It Should Happen to You (1954), said of him.  

“Introducing a new star, fast, fresh and funny,” the trailer for that film trumpeted Lemmon’s arrival. Lemmon could sing and dance as well as act. He was once described by Wilder, who worked with him many times, as coming somewhere between Cary Grant and Charlie Chaplin. Wilder, a close friend, revered him both as a superb comic actor and as a consummate professional. Lemmon researched roles carefully and always turned up on time, unlike some of the method actors Wilder had worked with. He didn’t complain, either, when his ideas were rejected.  

“He comes to my office and says, ‘Look, I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t we do this?’ And he talks for a little while, and I look at him in a funny way, and he says, ‘I didn’t like it either,’” Wilder later described a typical exchange during shooting.  

Nobody does exasperation on screen better than Lemmon. Whether as the prissy homebody fretting at the mess his roommate Walter Matthau has made in The Odd Couple (1968) or as the uptight businessman learning about his father’s seamy past in Avanti! (1972), he conveys bewilderment and indignation to maximum comic effect. He can be neurotic, but when he gets nervous it is more often an excuse for humour than it is for brooding, Montgomery Clift-like introspection.  

Lemmon had a wry attitude toward his own popularity. “‘America’s sweetheart’: that’s what pop used to call himself,” his son Chris Lemmon remembered.  

Nothing came easily to his characters, neither romantic fulfilment nor professional success. He would often be cast as hapless Everyman types for whom even staying afloat is a minor triumph. However, he played them with such elan that they never seemed like losers. He won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor right at the start of his screen career for Mister Roberts (1955) and enjoyed more or less unbroken success for over 40 years.  

When Lemmon took darker, more challenging roles, he generally excelled. It’s instructive to watch him as the struggling real estate salesman Shelley “the machine” Levene in Foley’s screen version of David Mamet’s play, Glengarry Glen Ross. Lemmon fires off Mamet’s expletive-ridden lines with relish. When he thinks he has made a sale, he rubs this crotch and is delighted to assert his long-dormant masculinity. However, we also get to see how cowed and pathetic he looks when being browbeaten by the domineering boss (Alec Baldwin).”Put that coffee down. Coffee is for closers,” Baldwin yells at him.  

Levene is on a prolonged losing streak, desperately trying to keep his dignity in a dog-eat-dog world. If he doesn’t turn things around, he’ll be fired. Lemmon plays the insecure old-timer so beautifully that you can’t help but wish he had been given the chance to portray Arthur Miller’s aging salesman Willy Loman on screen. As always, you root for his character, even when his behaviour is unethical and his language obscene.  

In the latter part of his career, Lemmon appeared in several “serious” dramas. He won a second Oscar as the crooked businessman in Save the Tiger (1973); he starred opposite Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas in crusading nuclear meltdown drama The China Syndrome (1979); he was the father searching for his lost son in fascist Chile in Costa-Gavras’ Missing (1982); he was in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991); he starred in a TV movie version of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1987) and worked with Robert Altman. He excelled in what he rather archly called his “important” films without changing audiences’ preconceptions about him as the man-next-door type, affable and crotchety by turns, in all those comedy-dramas. They liked him so much that they never let him stray too far from type.  

It’s a minor scandal that when the American Film Institute compiled a list of the 50 Greatest Screen Legends, Lemmon was nowhere to be seen. However, if the AFI was to take a popularity poll of favourite actors among the fans who’ll be watching and re-watching Some Like it Hot over the Christmas period, he would surely be very near the top – and that’s precisely where he deserves to remain.  

Some Like it Hot is broadcast on BBC Two at 1.13pm on Christmas Day