The illustrious master of emotions

Jack Lemmon passed away last week - almost exactly a year after the death of his constant screen companion Walter Matthau. ANAND PARTHASARATHY recalls the unforgettable screen moments of the ace actor who excelled in both comic and serious roles.

HIS FACE was usually suffused with laughter - but his eyes were edged with sadness. Which is perhaps why he was so successful both in dramatic and comic roles. ``He was the profound master of emotional canvas painting'', said actress Shirley MacLaine last week, ``Name the feeling and he could paint it - with himself as the brush''. She should know - having acted beside him in one of the most memorable of English languages comedies, ``The Apartment''.

On June 27, Jack Lemmon died of cancer in a Los Angeles hospital at the age of 76 - almost a year to the day after his constant screen companion, for 40 years, Walter Matthau passed away ( on July 1, 2000). Theirs was one of the great double acts of the screen and they partnered each other in eight films, many made by his mentor, director Billy Wilder, and based on plays by Neil Simon.

Discharged from the US Navy after World War II, Lemmon returned to Harvard and completed his degree before taking up his first love, acting. After a few undistinguished years doing minor roles in television sitcoms , Lemmon got a break in films - and in his fourth film, the John Ford-directed ``Mister Roberts'' (1955) opposite Henry Fonda, he won his first Oscar - for Supporting Actor - as a scheming sailor on board a wartime cargo ship.

But it was in 1959 that Lemmon found his comic stride in the first of seven films that he made with Billy Wilder - ``Some Like It Hot'', about two musicians ( Lemmon, Tony Curtis) who witness a mob massacre and escape from the gangsters by hiding,in drag, with an all-girl band headed by Marilyn Monroe. Lemmon, sporting a bizarre blonde wig and a high- pitched voice, attracts the amorous attention of an aging playboy played by Joe E. Brown, who mouths the film's classic closing lines. Told that his ``fiancee'' is a man, Brown reacts: ``Nobody's perfect!''

This was followed the very next year, by another Wilder product, the five-Oscar winner ``The Apartment'', where Lemmon tries to ingratiate himself with his superiors by lending his apartment for their extra marital trysts. Unfortunately, he finds that his own love is his boss's girlfriend (Shirley MacLaine).

The Wilder-Lemmon artistic collaboration also produced five more films, including the first products featuring the Lemmon-Walter Matthau double act. In 1968 ``The Odd Couple'' first pitted the sloppy Matthau against the fussy Lemmon, as they play divorced men staying together, in the screen version of a hit Neil Simon comedy. They reprised their roles after 30 years in ``The Odd Couple II'', where they are driving to attend their children's wedding. The magic was there - but barely.

In the 1974 remake of the classic Hollywood newsroom drama, ``The Front Page'', Matthau is the wily city editor, Lemmon the ace reporter. In ``Buddy Buddy'', Wilder's last film with the duo, they play an accident-prone hit man and the casual stranger who upsets his plans.It was the film that the Turner Classic Movies channel in India, aired last week to mark Lemmon's passing away. Lemmon's second Oscar came in 1974, for his portrayal of a garment maker who thinks he is a failure in ``Save The Tiger''. It underlined his capacity for serious dramatic roles marked by sympathy and compassion. The 1970s saw him play a conscience- stricken ``whistle blower'' who helps journalists Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas tell the truth about a hushed up accident in a nuclear power plant in ``The China Syndrome''; and the harassed father of a man whose radical son has gone ``Missing'' in a volatile Latin American state, with suspected US connivance. The film directed by renowned Greek film maker Costa Gavras, was a flag waver for liberal Americans in the post Vietnam era. Such films underpinned Lemmon's screen image as the possibly flawed but essentially decent guy-next-door.

The Lemmon-Matthau magic was recycled to diminishing effect in the 1990s in ``Grumpy Old Men'' and its sequel ``Grumpier Old Men''. In the former they play a pair of rural retirees who are distracted from their single passion - fishing - when a comely widow ( Ann Margret) comes to town. In the second helping, the ``new girl in town'' to catch their roving eyes is an Italian shop keeper (Sophia Loren in a rare comeback).

In recent months, satellite movie channel fans have seen Lemmon in some late-1990s films that never got a theatrical release here. With James Garner, he plays a pair of former American Presidents who come out of retirement to oust the corrupt new incumbent (Dan Aykroyd) in ``My Fellow Americans''. And in a TV remake of the classic jury drama ``Twelve Angry Men'', Lemmon plays the role made memorable by Henry Fonda in the original 1957 film - the lone juror who finally turns round his companions to deliver a not-guilty verdict. Watching this film on the small screen one was struck anew with the power and charisma that a veteran actor like Lemmon could bring to bear. One forgot that the action took place entirely in a closed room as one watched Lemmon, mesmerised, by the way he captured the minds of those on both sides of the camera - the wavering jury and the TV audience. It was to be one of Jack Lemmon's last screen appearances. He will be heard - but not seen - later this year when ``The Legend of Bagger Vance'', a tale of a legendary golfer (Matt Damon) and his mystical caddy (Will Smith), directed by Robert Redford, is released here.

``People are probably correct when they see me as the so-called Everyman'', The New York Times quoted him as saying, ``I'm attracted to contemporary characters, I understand their frustrations''. But those privileged to work alongside Jack Lemmon, valued him rather better. Director Billy Wilder said: ``Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon... I rate him somewhere between Charlie Chaplin and Cary Grant''. And as his biographer Don Widener noted, the sadness never left his eyes.

It brought a dignity to many slapstick roles that he played, roles, in funny women's clothing, that would have descended to cheap farce in lesser hands. But with Jack Lemmon on the screen, one was moved even as one broke out laughing. And when we laughed at Jack Lemmon, we were laughing at ourselves, because he was indeed, Everyman.

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