Jack Lemmon’s most celebrated roles occurred in film – Ensign Pulver in Mister Roberts, Felix Unger in The Odd Couple and Jerry/Daphne in Some Like It Hot. The touring Broadway musical of Some Like It Hot will be presented at the Straz Dec. 10-15.
The actor, who died in 2001, also was a presence on Broadway and early in his career believed the stage, not the screen, was his destiny.
A film talent scout saw Lemmon in Room Service (1953), his first Broadway role and was sure Lemmon could be a screen star. His first lead film role was 1954’s It Should Happen to You opposite film veteran film star Judy Holliday.
Lemmon said Holliday helped convince him to pursue film roles, despite his attitude toward Hollywood.
“I was a snot-nose, I must admit that,” Lemmon told The Washington Post in 1986. “I would rather have sat around the old Walgreen’s drugstore in New York with all the other out-of-work actors, pooh-poohing guys in films. If it wasn’t for Judy, I’m not sure I would have concentrated on films.”
Lemmon didn’t leave the stage behind entirely, returning to Broadway and earning Tony® nominations for roles in Tribute (1978) and Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1986), which also was produced as a movie on television.
But it’s his film career that is most celebrated. He won two Oscars® — Best Supporting Actor for Mister Roberts (1955), Best Actor for Save the Tiger (1973), and had six other Best Actor nominations.
Lemmon was considered Hollywood’s everyman, a performer to whom audiences could relate. Part of that was physical: He was handsome but not a heartthrob. He was masculine but not in a scene-chewing alpha male way. He didn’t play heroes or villains so much as he played characters reacting to situations, sometimes honorably, sometimes less so.
On the set of It Should Happen to You, director George Cukor repeatedly offered the young Lemmon the same comment: “Jack, less. A little less.”
Lemmon finally snapped, “Are you trying to tell me not to act at all?” “Oh yes! God, yes!” Cukor exclaimed.
“Best piece of direction I ever got,” Lemmon said. “Don’t act. Let it happen.”
Lemmon’s talent for letting it happen made his characters believable even in outrageous situations. In Some Like It Hot (1959), for example, he and Tony Curtis played prohibition-era musicians who witness a gangland murder. On the run from the killers, the pair disguise themselves as women to join an all-female band. The movie also starred Marilyn Monroe.
It’s a broad comic premise and, yes, still funny 65 years later. Watch Lemmon’s performance, though, and you won’t see an actor going for laughs. You’ll see a man reacting to an outrageous situation while trying not to get killed. And still getting laughs.
The performance earned Lemmon a Best Actor nomination at the Oscars®. He also was nominated for the same award for The Apartment (1960), The Days of Wine and Roses (1962), The China Syndrome (1979), Tribute (1980) and Missing (1982).
His sole Best Actor win was for 1973’s Save the Tiger. He played Harry Stoner, a business owner watching his American dream turn nightmarish. He turns to crime to keep his company afloat, and Lemmon masterfully conveys not only Harry’s desperation but his frustration and anger at watching the promise of his future dying.
Lemmon’s everyman wasn’t a caricature. Lemmon inhabited characters as if he knew their backstories, their motivations, why they did what they did, far beyond anything in the script. He put their conflicts, their desperation and most of all their humanity front and center.
In 1992’s Glengarry Glen Ross, Lemmon played Shelley “The Machine” Levene, a once successful real estate salesman facing termination after a long luckless streak. Levene is going down, and the audience can feel it from the start. But Lemmon never goes for pity or cheap sentimentality. Shelley has the same hubris and willingness to deceive as the office’s more successful agents. He’s just not as good at it. Lemmon walks the audience along a line of sympathy and revulsion throughout the film.
Jerry/Daphne in Some Like It Hot was far easier to like. But Lemmon’s Jerry is as human as his Shelley: anxious, sometimes flabbergasted, often frustrated, occasionally hopeful.