Clown Prince: JACK LEMMON (1925-2001)

(2 of 2)

In his first eminence, Lemmon was usually the nice Joe--"honest, thrifty, methodical, sober, upright and really kinda dull," as he says of himself in Phffft!--getting wooed by prime kooky blonds Judy Holliday and Kim Novak. With Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment and Irma la Douce, he was the shy gent pursuing a knowing woman, the lamb trying to persuade himself to be a wolf. But the Lemmon male was more in control when surrounded by men. From early service comedies like Mister Roberts through all the films in which he played Nellie to Walter Matthau's Butch (The Fortune Cookie, the Odd Couple, the Grumpy Old Men movies), he made himself at home in the blustering camaraderie of the male world. Then fate and circumstance would conspire, and Lemmon would be at an all-night poker party with a cold hand.

As he aged, Lemmon found inspiration in the works of "serious" authors--John Osborne (a TV version of The Entertainer), David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross), Raymond Carver (Short Cuts)--writers with the bilious comic flow of a Wilder, but with no happy ending as a reward for all that suffering. In Glengarry Glen Ross, Lemmon is Shelley Levene, a peddler of diseased land and phony hopes, and a failure not because of scruples but because the system he serves is stacked against him.

America, the proudest nation in the 1950s, later slouched into self-doubt, and Lemmon boldly charted that course onscreen. He demonstrated, for an audience not always eager to hear it, the poignant truth of Joe E. Brown's flippant observation to Lemmon at the end of Some Like It Hot: "Nobody's perfect." Jack Lemmon wasn't either, but he had one great American trait--bravery--that served him well as deft comedian and slapstick tragedian, cunning artist and surpassing entertainer.