American Legends: The Life of Jack Lemmon

“It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.” – Jack Lemmon

A lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of history’s most influential figures, but how much of the forest is lost for the trees? In Charles River Editors’ American Legends series, readers can get caught up to speed on the lives of America’s most important men and women in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known.

The great film director Billy Wilder once noted of Jack Lemmon that Lemmon “was my everyman”, and Lemmon did indeed represent a great everyman to American audiences during the latter half of the 20th century. For rich, poor, and working class audiences alike, Lemmon was an accessible leading male, someone certainly less stately than Cary Grant or Laurence Olivier and seemingly more approachable even than archetypal leading men such as Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda. Viewers may not have known Lemmon on a personal level, yet his easygoing demeanor made it easy for the American public to feel as if they knew Lemmon. His wide appeal is summarized nicely by Richard T. Stanley, who noted that he “had the personality and versatile talent to star in any era,” and Lemmon became intimately associated with other famous figures of Hollywood, including director Billy Wilder and actor Walter Matthau.

If Lemmon’s persona was that of the everyman, the actual narrative of his life tells a somewhat different story. In fact, he did not come from working-class roots but was instead raised in a wealthy family and educated only in the most exclusive institutions that many could buy, including exclusive prep schools and then Harvard University. Lemmon was an honorable citizen who served in the Navy, but he was also someone who benefitted from educational and economic opportunities that were unavailable to the vast majority of the country, and while he would never have reached the level of fame he attained without hard work, his life story does not reflect the upward mobility that can be seen in the biographies of many other famous actors. One could even argue that the miracle of his career is that someone from such wealth could manage to construct an everyman persona in the first place.

In addition, while Lemmon was a master at shielding the darker aspects of his personal life, he experienced a great deal of adversity, from the separation of his parents to his struggles with alcoholism and the cancer that eventually took his life. Lemmon led a privileged life, but this biography examines these struggles as well as his triumphs in order to explicate the construction of his persona and the artistic and cultural implications of the life and career of this storied Hollywood actor.

American Legends: The Life of Jack Lemmon chronicles the life and career of one of America’s favorite actors. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Jack Lemmon like never before, in no time at all.