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John Uhler Lemmon III (February 8, 1925 – June 27, 2001), better known as Jack Lemmon, was one of the most award-winning American actors of his generation.
Life and careerLemmon was born in an elevator in Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, where his father, John Uhler Lemmon, Jr., was the president of a doughnut company. His mother was Mildred Burgess Noel.[1] After attending Phillips Academy and Harvard University (becoming president of the Hasty Pudding Club), Lemmon joined the Navy, received V-12 training and served as an ensign. On being discharged, he took up acting professionally, working on radio, television and Broadway.
He became a favorite actor of director Billy Wilder, starring in his films Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Irma La Douce, Avanti, and The Front Page. Wilder felt Lemmon had a natural tendency toward overacting that had to be tempered; the Wilder biography "Nobody's Perfect" quotes the director as saying: "Lemmon, I would describe him as a ham, a fine ham, and with ham you have to trim a little fat." The same Billy Wilder biography quotes Jack Lemmon as saying: "I am particularly susceptible to the parts I play... If my character was having a nervous breakdown I started to have one." Image:Jack Lemmon 1967.jpg Jack Lemmon at Expo 1967. Lemmon was awarded Best Supporting Actor for Mister Roberts (1955), and Best Actor for Save the Tiger (1973), being the first actor to achieve this double. He was also nominated for Best Actor award for his role in the controversial film Missing in 1982. In 1988, the American Film Institute gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award.
Throughout his career, Lemmon often appeared in films alongside actor Walter Matthau. They would go on to be one of the most beloved duos in cinema history. Among their pairings was as Felix Unger (Lemmon) and Oscar Madison (Matthau) in the 1968 film, The Odd Couple. They also starred together in The Fortune Cookie, The Front Page, and Buddy Buddy. Additionally, both had small parts in Oliver Stone's 1991 film, JFK (the only film in which they both appear, but share no screentime). In 1993, the duo teamed up again to star in Grumpy Old Men. The film was a surprise hit, earning the two actors a new generation of young fans. During the rest of the decade, they would go on to star together in Out to Sea, Grumpier Old Men and the widely-panned The Odd Couple II. At the 1998 Golden Globe Awards, he was nominated for "Best Actor in a Made for TV Movie" for his role in Twelve Angry Men. He lost the award to Ving Rhames. After accepting the award, Rhames asked Lemmon to come onstage and in a move that stunned the audience, gave his award to him. (The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which presents the Golden Globes, decided to have a second award made and sent to Rhames.) Lemmon was one of the best-liked actors in Hollywood. He is remembered as taking time for people, as the actor Kevin Spacey recalled in a tribute. When already regarded as a legend, he met the teenage Spacey backstage after a theater performance and spoke to him about pursuing an acting career. Spacey would later work with Lemmon in the critically acclaimed film Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), where one of its most powerful scenes involves Lemmon's character begging Spacey's character for another shot at making a sale. Lemmon was married twice. His son, Chris Lemmon (born in 1954 by first wife, Cynthia Stone), is an actor. His second wife was the actress Felicia Farr, with whom he had a daughter, Courtney, born in 1966. Jack Lemmon died of "carcinomatosis and metastatic cancer of bladder to colon" (according to his death certificate at [1]) on June 27, 2001, at the age of 76. He had been fighting the disease, very privately, for two years before losing the battle. He is interred at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, Westwood, Los Angeles, California, where Walter Matthau is also buried. In typical Jack Lemmon wit, his gravestone simply reads 'Jack Lemmon - in'. After Matthau's death in 2000, Lemmon appeared with friends and relatives of the actor on a "Larry King Live" show in tribute. A year later, many of the same people appeared on the show again to pay tribute to Lemmon. FilmographyTV work
Awards and nominationsAcademy Awards
Golden Globe AwardsCurrently, Jack Lemmon holds the record for most Golden Globe nominations with twenty-two.
BibliographyFootnotes
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