Aging Well With Four New Films Coming Up, Jack Lemmon Is Busier Than Ever

Getting better with age is a rare enough phenomenon. Doing it after starting at the top 40 years ago - well, the odds are darn near incalculable.

But Jack Lemmon keeps expanding and improving four decades after winning his first Oscar for his fourth movie role, Ensign Pulver in the naval comedy “Mister Roberts” (his Best Actor Academy Award came in 1973, for “Save the Tiger’s” compellingly corrupt businessman).

At 70, the versatile actor is busier than ever, with four new films scheduled for this year, including his first stab at Shakespeare in Kenneth Branagh’s all-star version of “Hamlet.”

Lemmon recently has become a favorite of such demanding directors as Robert Altman (for whom he appeared in “Short Cuts” and “The Player”) and Oliver Stone (“JFK”), and of playwright David Mamet, whose “Glengarry Glen Ross” arguably provided Lemmon with his best role of the ‘90s.

The actor admits, however, that his current release, the cranky comedy sequel “Grumpier Old Men,” wasn’t exactly a career challenge.

“It’s so easy, in a way” to play broad, insult humor with his frequent co-star and longtime friend, Walter Matthau, Lemmon said. “Not that acting is easy, or I look for it to be easy. But these films are very comfortable and enjoyable.”

And lucrative. Two years ago, “Grumpy Old Men,” in which Lemmon and Matthau introduced the cantankerous Minnesota neighbors who’d nurtured a lifelong feud-cum-friendship, grossed $140 million worldwide. “Grumpier” is one of the few bona fide hits of the just-past holiday season, having debuted in fourth place on the Christmas weekend box-office chart with a sturdy $7.8 million.

The two comedies have, basically, kept Lemmon a bankable star at an age when most of his contemporaries have been forced into semiretirement. Lemmon attributes the pictures’ appeal to several factors.

“They’re about mainstream characters that are easily identifiable and easy to identify with,” Lemmon observed. “I play a retired teacher; he was a TV salesman. And, basically, these are romantic comedies, but about older couples: the first one, Ann-Margret and I; this one, Walter and Sophia Loren. That’s something that Hollywood just doesn’t do. Why, I don’t know. It’s as if you’re supposed to be dead after you’re 40 or something.”

The real relationship in the movie is, of course, between Lemmon and Matthau, who’ve made half a dozen movies together since the mid-1960s, among them such comedy classics as “The Odd Couple” and “The Fortune Cookie” (Matthau won an Oscar for that one). Matthau also starred in Lemmon’s sole stab at movie directing, “Kotch,” a 1971 forerunner of the kind of geriatric comedy they’re cashing in on now.

“It’s just a chemical sort of thing; we’re both on the same wavelength and it clicks,” Lemmon said of working with Matthau. “It’s something that you can’t control. You can put two good actors together and it isn’t too exciting. You can put two other good actors together and - bang! - it’s like that’s the third star. It has nothing to do with talent or anything, it’s just that they happen to blend.

“And we’re also very close personally, which helps. The more you see of each other, the better you work together, in many ways. Walter’s disarmingly bright, widely read and his knowledge of the craft is terrific. Above all, he really cracks me up.”

Yeah. But do you ever argue like in the movies?

“Well, we don’t fight like the grumpy old men do,” Lemmon said with a laugh. “I like the way Walter thinks, but we don’t necessarily agree on everything. We’ll be discussing something and I’ll say, ‘You’re full of it.’ He’ll say, ‘No, you are.’ I’ll say, ‘All right,’ and let it go at that.”

Lemmon’s easygoing demeanor, combined with a Boston-bred Yankee work ethic that dates back to his college days in Harvard University’s dramatic club, are two things that have kept the actor in demand for almost half a century.

“Jack’s a dream to work with,” said “Old Men” producer John Davis. “He’s a gentleman and a professional, willing to work the entire day if need be. He’s all about pitching in and making it work; every take with Jack Lemmon is priceless.”

Some of the finest comedy filmmakers in the business have long agreed. George Cukor gave Lemmon his first film role in the 1954 “It Should Happen to You.” Blake Edwards cast him in “The Great Race” (and, more seriously, in the alcoholic drama “Days of Wine and Roses” and the late-life crisis study “That’s Life!”).

But it was Billy Wilder who employed Lemmon’s comic gifts most brilliantly in a series of sophisticated entertainments that ranged from the ultimate drag farce “Some Like It Hot” to the disturbing romantic dramedy “The Apartment,” which won the 1960 Best Picture Academy Award. Lemmon also starred in Wilder’s “Irma la Douce,” “Avanti!,” “The Fortune Cookie,” “The Front Page” and “Buddy Buddy,” the latter three opposite Matthau.

But Lemmon is more than just a consummate film comedian. He appeared in an acclaimed New York staging of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” 10 years ago. And his work in “The China Syndrome” and “Missing” made him the only man who’s ever won the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actor award twice.

“I was lucky to have been able to get established in both comedy and drama,” Lemmon said. “That’s a big, big plus, ‘cause there are twice as many parts that way.”

And they keep on coming. Lemmon plays a con man in the adaptation of Truman Capote’s “The Grass Harp,” which was directed by Matthau’s son Charles; a Nazi commandant (“Now there’s a stretch,” Lemmon accurately noted) in the black comedy “Getting Away With Murder”; and a rural California impresario in the episodic social satire “A Weekend in the Country.” And he’ll soon portray the worried old soldier at the start of “Hamlet.”

“I’ve got to corner Kenneth and ask him to explain my lines to me,” Lemmon cracked. “It may be in English, but I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.”