American cinema has lost one of its most versatile and often underestimated talents with the death of Jack Lemmon, of cancer in Southern California late on Wednesday night. At 76, he was one of the last survivors of arguably the greatest generation of Hollywood actors.
A true natural actor who never let the process show in his performances, he will be remembered by generations of film-lovers, and he leaves behind a body of work that is sure to endure far into the future.
Born into a wealthy Boston family on February 8th, 1925, Lemmon was educated at Harvard and served in the navy during the second World War before turning to acting. He worked in radio, television and theatre before making an impressive film debut opposite Judy Holliday in the quirky comedy, It Should Happen to You.
A year later, on just his fourth film, he received the best supporting actor Oscar for his engaging portrayal of the wise cracking Ensign Pulver in the wartime comedy, Mister Roberts, directed by Mervyn Le Roy and John Ford.
The brilliant Austrian-born director, Billy Wilder, tapped into Lemmon's full potential as a comedy actor when he cast him and Tony Curtis as unemployed musicians on the run from gangsters and donning drag to join an all-woman band in the timeless 1959 Some Like It Hot, one of the most enduring of all screen classics.
Over the next three decades Lemmon demonstrated a deceptive ease with the many comedy roles which came his way. He was generally cast as a hapless ordinary guy thrown out of his depth by circumstances outside his control, perhaps most memorably in Wilder's underrated Avanti! (1972).
Lemmon found a perfect comic foil in Walter Matthau, their collaborations beginning in 1966 with The Fortune Cookie (also known as Meet Whiplash Willie) and notably continuing with The Odd Couple (1969) and The Front Page (1974). Lemmon proved himself at least as adept at serious drama, in such outstanding portrayals as the alcoholic public relations man in Days of Wine and Roses (1965), and as the financially troubled garment manufacturer on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Save the Tiger (1972), for which he won the best actor Oscar.
Playing the chief engineer of a damaged nuclear power plant, he brought both authority and edginess to The China Syndrome (1979). Three years later, in an even more overtly political thriller, Costa-Gavras's Missing, Lemmon gave what is perhaps the crowning performance of his career, vividly capturing the fears and traumas of another of his average guys, a perplexed, conservative American who goes in search of his son who was "disappeared" by the junta in Chile. It earned him another Oscar nomination - he received eight in all - and the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival.
Lemmon's last great film performance came in 1992, when he shone among the dynamic ensemble cast of Glengarry Glen Ross, playing a desperate, insecure real estate salesman whom he caught in all the character's inner turmoil.
On meeting Jack Lemmon for an interview in 1989, it quickly became clear that the endearing quality he brought to so many of his characterisations was rooted in a projection of his own personality.
He was modest and self-deprecating about his many fine achievements as an actor, and the keen intelligence and intuition he brought to bear on them, but also clearly contented with his life and work. As he deserved to have been.