Here’s a long quote from Billy Wilder on the genius of Jack Lemmon. Genius indeed.
Jack Lemmon was my Everyman. And he could do everything, except carry a love interest to the extreme, to kissing and the precoitus thing. That is very difficult, because people could then laugh. He’s very good. It’s not a fault. It’s his quality. He would surprise me too. He would come to the set in the morning, almost all made up, at 8:30 am, on the stage where I am working. He was figuring out how he would do the scene. He was almost made up and he would say, ‘Last night, Felicia [Lemmon’s wife] and I were running the lines and a wonderful idea came up.’ Then he tells me the idea, and I would go –” [shakes his head] “And he would say, ‘I don’t like it either.’ And he left the stage, finished his makeup, played the scene beautifully, and never brought it up again. He did not force it in his voice, and he did not ask everyone to listen to his great idea which was not all that great. Somebody else would fight me, and I would have to say, ‘It’s no good, because it leads someplace else.’ Not Lemmon. There was a little bit of genius in everything he did.
