Jack Lemmon put his acting on hold until after his service in the navy. When he returned to civilian life, he began to pay his dues as an actor, working on radio, Off- Broadway, and especially in television, where he honed his craft in more than 400 appearances during one five-year stretch. By the time he made his movie debut opposite JUDY HOLLIDAY in It Should Happen to You (1954), Jack Lemmon was already a seasoned performer despite his baby face and relative youth (he was 29). Jack Lemmon's rise to stardom was swift. His supporting performance as Ensign Pulver in only his fourth film, Mr. Roberts (1955), won him an Oscar. Many other strong performances followed in Operation Mad Ball (1957), Cowboy (1958), and Bell, Book, and Candle (1959).
The 1960s was Jack Lemmon's most successful decade. Virtually every one of his films during that 10-year span was a hit. During that long string of box-office winners, the actor showed great range, starring in, among others, the bleak drama The Days of Wine and Roses (1962), the bawdy sex comedy Irma La Douce (1963), the black comedy The Fortune Cookie (1966), which was also the first of his many acting collaborations with WALTER MATTHAU, and the purely entertaining The Odd Couple (1968), which not only continued Jack Lemmon's acting relationship with Matthau but also launched another long and fruitful association with playwright and screenwriter NEIL SIMON.
Jack Lemmon had fewer hits in the 1970s as his comic persona, which best suited the late 1950s and the early 1960s, became passé. He was, nonetheless, able to help turn The Out-of-Towners (1970) and The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975) into hits, helped also by two very funny Neil Simon scripts. From a commercial standpoint, he was less successful with films such as The War Between Men and Women (1972), Avanti! (1972), The Front Page (1974), and Alex and the Gypsy (1976). He received excellent reviews for his performance in the TV film The Entertainer (1976) but was reduced in 1977 to joining the all-star cast of Airport '77. Also during the 1970s, Jack Lemmon tried his hand at directing, working behind the camera in the Walter Matthau comedy Kotch (1971). The film was generally well received by both the critics and the public, but Jack Lemmon did not directed again.
Jack Lemmon continued to lean more heavily toward drama in his later years, playing a dying man in Tribute (1980), a concerned father in Missing (1982), and a cynical priest in Mass Appeal (1984). Two comedies in which he appeared, Buddy, Buddy (1982) and Macaroni (1985), were both critical and commercial flops. In 1989 Jack Lemmon played Ted Danson's ailing father in Dad, and saved the picture from being maudlin. In 1991 he played Jack Martin, the assistant to Jim Bannister in OLIVER STONE's JFK. Jack Lemmon played a successful businessman in the less-than-successful For Richer, for Poorer (1992), but one of the triumphs of his long career also came in 1992 when he was cast as the schlumpy over-the-hill salesman Shelly Levine in James Foley's film adaptation of the DAVID MAMET play Glengarry, Glen Ross, with an exceptional cast including AL PACINO, KEVIN SPACEY, Alan Arkin, ED HARRIS, Alec Baldwin, and Jonathan Pryce. Jack Lemmon garnered Best Actor awards from the National Board of Review and the Venice Film Festival.
In his later years, Jack Lemmon truly became an actor's actor, though he took on too many roles that were inferior to his talents, teaming himself, for example, with Walter Matthau in Grumpy Old Men (1993) and its sequel Grumpier Old Men (1995). This link with Matthau went back to the 1968 Odd Couple, which 30 years later was followed by The Odd Couple 2. He starred yet again with Matthau as his brother-in-law in Out to Sea (1997). They were, after all, an entertaining two-some, and all of these films were very popular. The Grass Harp (1995) paired Jack Lemmon and Matthau again in an adaptation of a Truman Capote story, directed by Matthau's son, Charles. Jack Lemmon also attempted a comic turn with James Garner in My Fellow Americans (1996).\
Jack Lemmon appeared in cameo roles in ROBERT ALTMAN's Short Cuts (1993) and in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (1995) as a rather awkward and geriatric spear-carrier. He was not a convincing soldier. In 1997 Jack Lemmon teamed with actors Hume Cronyn, GEORGE C. SCOTT, and others for the television remake of the classic 12 Angry Men (1957). One of Jack Lemmon's last roles was that of the golfing narrator in The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), directed by ROBERT REDFORD.
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