Warren Cowen & Associates Two-time Oscar winner
Jack Lemmon will accept the Spencer Tracy Award
for outstanding dramatic actor in motion pictures Tuesday in Royce
Hall. His film career spans nearly five decades.
By Terry Tang
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Two-time Oscar winner Jack Lemmon said that he must have
inherited some of his mother’s stubbornness.
While playing bridge at a friend’s house outside of
Boston, a pregnant Mildred Lemmon began to feel contractions. Yet
she refused to quit the game. When her water broke, her husband
finally managed to usher her to the car.
“They barely got in the hospital before I started popping
out of there,” Lemmon said in a telephone interview from his
Beverly Hills home. “They never got out of the elevator. It
all happened right there, which explains why I’m an only
child.”
Despite all the ups and downs in his life, John Uhler Lemmon III
has continued to move audiences on film, television and the stage.
Currently appearing on-screen in “The Legend of Bagger
Vance,” Lemmon, 75, also nabbed an Emmy last September for
his performance in the miniseries “Tuesdays With
Morrie.” Now he can count the Spencer Tracy Award as another
laurel.
 Paramount Pictures Jack Lemmon and
Walter Matthau star in Neil Simon’s "The Odd
Couple II." Given out each year by UCLA Campus Events Commission,
the Spencer Tracy Award, named after the Academy Award-winning
actor, recognizes an outstanding dramatic actor in motion pictures.
Lemmon will accept the award Tuesday at noon in a ceremony at Royce
Hall, which is open to the public. A question and answer session
will follow.
The accolade puts Lemmon in a group that includes Tom Hanks,
Jodie Foster, Nicolas Cage and ““ last year’s winner
““ Kirk Douglas.
Unlike most of the recipients, Lemmon has crossed paths with his
award’s namesake. As Lemmon recalls, it was the late 1950s
and both he and Tracy were under contract at Columbia Pictures. One
day, he got to meet Tracy, who was shooting “The Last
Hurrah” on a neighboring soundstage.
“Dick Quine, who was my director ““ a dear friend
““ brought me over and introduced me. He was very pleasant,
very nice,” said Lemmon, who remembers being awestruck and
somewhat inarticulate.
Lemmon’s obvious admiration for Tracy was what drew him to
accept the award. He professes to having seen all of Tracy’s
films. In fact, Lemmon cites Tracy’s Academy Award-winning
turn in the 1937 film “Captains Courageous,” where
Tracy played a fisherman, as the first film that truly inspired his
career choice. He still recollects the depth of Tracy’s
performance.
“Watching him work as a young actor “¦ never once did
I ever feel he was just waiting for a cue,” Lemmon said.
“He was really listening, not just to the words but to the
person and trying to glean the meaning that was behind the words,
which is what a good actor does.”
A good actor also, according to Lemmon, learns basic thespian
skills. As someone who spent his Harvard years with the Dramatic
Club and then worked on and off Broadway, Lemmon believes too many
youths prematurely move to Hollywood with naive notions about
acting.
 Paramount Pictures Jack Lemmon stars in
Neil Simon’s "The Odd Couple II."
“The most important thing for a young actor is not, first
of all, to start thinking about being a star, or whatever the hell
that is, but to think of being a working actor and to work on the
stage,” Lemmon said. “There are so many kids that come
out here and try like hell to get into television and movies and
they don’t know anything yet.
“You can’t learn acting doing films and doing
television,” Lemmon continued. “It’s very, very
difficult to do it that way because it’s all broken up into
bits and pieces and that’s an awful lot easier once
you’ve had experience as an actor on the stage where you get
a chance to do complete scenes and acts.”
Perhaps the stage is where Lemmon learned to transcend genres so
easily. His resume lists a multitude of comedic and dramatic
portrayals. Whether it was a depressed dressmaker in “Save
the Tiger” or an errant salesman in “Glengarry Glen
Ross,” Lemmon has carved a niche playing vulnerable and
complex characters.
Meanwhile, he has aroused laughter across generations from his
performance in drag in the screwball classic “Some Like It
Hot,” to his loveable grouch in “Grumpy Old Men.”
But in Lemmon’s point of view, fewer comedies today have good
scripts that don’t rely on gross-out antics.
“What’s missing in comedy today most of the time is
“¦ a growth of characters where the comedy comes out of the
behavior of the people within the situation. It’s all
off-the-wall half the time and pushing the envelope of decency, let
alone humor, as far as I’m concerned,” Lemmon said.
“There aren’t that many comedies that grab me. I think
that “˜Analyze This’ was one of the best comedies
I’ve ever seen. I just adored it. I thought it was brilliant.
I expected it out of Billy Crystal, who was wonderful, but I
thought Bobby DeNiro ““ he blew my mind.”
The actor, who resides with his wife of 38 years, actor Felicia
Farr, has a couple of movie roles in the works. He will go before
the cameras as a munitions manager in “Power Failure,”
a satire on big business and government. But the actor also hopes
to return to the stage someday.
 Paramount Pictures Jack Lemmon and
Walter Matthau star in Neil Simon’s "The Odd
Couple II." He was last seen on Broadway in 1985 in Eugene
O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into
Night.” But the venue doesn’t seem to matter to Lemmon.
A sign of an actor who has paid his dues, Lemmon throws around
possible theater locations with the ease of a guy planning his next
vacation.
“I don’t particularly care about going back to
Broadway, frankly,” Lemmon said. “If I do another play
in the near future ““ which I would like to do ““ I would
just as soon do it here or London. I love London most of
all.”
An avid golfer, Lemmon spends much of his spare time working on
his game. But retirement is the furthest thought from his mind.
Audiences will never see Lemmon stop working out of his own accord.
He said the only way he would step away from the camera is if he
got run over by a truck or a producer “¦ or a critic.
“Unless that happens, I’ll just keep on
going,” he said.
AWARD: The 12th Annual Spencer Tracy Award will be presented to
Jack Lemmon at noon on Tuesday in Royce Hall. The event is free.
Tickets are available at the Central Ticket Office. For more
information, call (310) 825-2101 or visit
www.campusevents.ucla.edu.