Tom McParland looks back on the life and career of legendary Hollywood actor Jack Lemmon, who received numerous accolades including two Oscars for his many roles, be they dramatic or comic, in over sixty films.

 

To describe Jack Lemmon as a distinguished actor would be to do him and acting a great injustice. For when Lemmon acted in front of a camera he familiarised us with our unfamiliarity. Small wonder then that actor-director Kenneth Branagh honouring Lemmon at the Kennedy Center in 1996 said, ‘One second before the call for Action! Jack has a ritual; he bows his head and whispers to himself ‘‘magic time”’.

Perhaps it’s as good a theory as any that Belfastman Branagh should attribute Lemmon’s unique ability to his half-Irish half-English parentage, particularly given the historically explosive nature of such a combination.
And so it was that John Uhler Lemmon III, after interrupting his mother’s game of bridge two months early, made his remarkable first entrance on Sunday February 8, 1925 in an elevator en route to the delivery room of Newton-Wellesley Hospital, Boston. ‘Last thing I heard was they put a plaque in the elevator notarising my birth there’ he was to say later.

The only son of John Uhler and Mildred Burgess Lemmon II, his father was president of the Doughnut Corporation of America and Jack junior was raised Catholic. From an early age Jack enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle. But he was often unwell – spending two years in hospital by the time he’d turned 12.

His acting debut came at age four when his father volunteered him for an amateur stage production of Thar’s Gold in Them Thar Hills. After this unqualified personal triumph, young Jack was hooked. A perspicacious child, he taught himself piano and double bass. Yet he knew early on what he wanted to do. ‘I always wanted to be what I felt I was already – an actor.’ There was no decision involved.
For Jack doughnuts held no attraction so the family business was never for him. From an early age too Jack realised that his parents’ marriage was in difficulty (‘I had a happy childhood, but it was tempered with an acute awareness of pain’). By the age of 18 his parents had separated and perhaps because of their religion, never remarried.
At Rivers School he acted in school productions as well as in his senior year (1943) at Phillips Andover Academy. He enrolled at Harvard College (Class of 1947) and was an active member of several drama clubs – and president of the Hasty Pudding Club.

An unexceptional Harvard undergraduate Lemmon was forbidden to act onstage in an effort to improve his academic concentration and achievement. Lemmon ignored these university rules, appearing in roles under such pseudonyms as Timothy Orange or, the downright blatant Melvyn Meringue.

With the onset of WWII, Lemmon was conscripted into the V-12 Navy College Training Program, a crash course to increase US Navy officers from the intelligentsia. After Lemmon was commissioned he briefly served as an ensign on an aircraft carrier before returning to Harvard to complete his education.

1947 found Lemmon in New York enrolled as a drama student at the Herbert Berghof Studio, a non-profit facility training hopefuls for a theatrical career. The HB studio alumnus read like a movie director’s dream: Carroll Baker, Robert De Niro, George Segal and Sandy Dennis. Lemmon was lucky enough to have the tutelage of Uta Hagen, a doyen of American theatre acting.

Although helped financially by his father, Lemmon insisted he supported himself by taking evening jobs as unpaid waiters, as well as performing in seedy beer halls or piano bars playing the hits of the day to augment a meagre income. Daytime saw him doing the punishing audition rounds of agents, off-Broadway try-outs and TV and radio studios.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own