Jack Lemmon, who died on June 28th 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 be best remembered for his collaboration with his friend Walter Matthau in The Odd Couple, and for seven films 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.
Although he 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. Jack 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.
His big break came in 1955 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 films, as well as the highly successful Cool Hand Luke (1967), starring Paul Newman.
His relationship with Billy 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. Jack 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 C.C. 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 C.C. himself longs for. This biting satire gave him the type of role he was to reprise, perhaps too often: that of a likeable man confused and pressured by circumstance. This was the first indication of the mature Jack Lemmon where, in the British theatre director 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. Arguably Edwards's best film, it began a collaboration that led, in 1965, to Jack 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 The Fortune Cookie (1966) with Matthau. 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.
In 1979, he 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.
In Mass Appeal (1984), he was a priest trying to help a young homosexual with his faith. 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 Jack Lemmon's actress wife, Felicia Farr, as the seductress.
In an effort to stretch himself after that, he 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 made his London dΘbut in the piece, directed by Jonathan Miller. They subsequently filmed it for television.
As the years progressed, he 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 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 film 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.
Jack Lemmon is survived by his wife Felicia, their daughter Courtney, and son Chris from his first marriage.
John (Jack) Uhler Lemmon: born 1925; died, June 2001