Jack Lemmon Dead At 76

A master of comedy, great at drama, actor Jack Lemmon has lost his battle with cancer at age 76. Lemmon underwent surgery to remove an inflamed gall bladder last month and had been in and out of Los Angeles hospitals over the past several months, his publicist Warren Cowan said.

At his bedside as he passed away late Wednesday night in a Los-Angeles cancer-center, reports CBS News Correspondent Dan Raviv, were his wife Felicia — they married in 1962 — their daughter, and his son from his first marriage.

Lemmon's acting career spanned the second half of the 20th century. He received an extraordinary eight Academy Award nominations, and won twice.

He won his first Oscar — as Best Supporting Actor — for his performance in "Mr. Roberts" as the scheming young ensign who finds the courage to directly challenge irrational authority. The year was 1955, just one year after his big screen debut.

Lemmon hadn't come to Hollywood as a novice though. He'd been schooled on the New York stage — and by hundreds of appearances on the live television dramas of the early 50's. Before that Lemmon was president of Harvard University's prestigious theatrical group, the Hasty Pudding Club.

He made more than 60 films, and time and again, Lemmon proved that no role was beyond his reach — not even playing a man disguised as woman who befriends an unsuspecting Marilyn Monroe. "Some Like It Hot" brought Lemmon a best actor Academy Award nomination in 1959.

He was nominated again in 1960 for "The Apartment" and in 1962 for "Days of Wine and Roses."

But the Oscar for best actor eluded Lemmon till 1973 when he won for "Save the Tiger." He played a clothing manufacturer struggling to keep his business and his life from falling apart.

"Hope! You better the ask the old lady in Vegas with a dixie cup full of nickels. She still has hope," he said in the film.

For Lemmon, the challenge of being an actor meant doing a mix of deeply emotional roles and lighthearted comedies.

In a 1989 interview, Lemmon reflected on his father's dying words, which he said have guided him throughout his career. "He looked at me in a lucid moment, and said, 'Spread a little sunshine'...Never forgot it."

The brilliant on-screen pairing of Jack Lemmon with Walter Matthau delighted fans for decades.

In "The Odd Couple," Lemmon's ultra-fastidious Felix Unger matched wits and lifestyles with Matthau's Oscar Madison, the less-than-fastidious friend who takes him in when his wife throws him out.

Lemmon and Matthau teamed up for ten films, including a 1998 reprise of "Odd Couple" made thirty years after the original and the "Grumpy Old Men" movies of the mid-nineties.

When he wasn't working, Lemmon liked to play golf and the piano. In fact, he composed the theme for the film "Tribute," in which he played a dying man trying to reconcile with his son.

Born February 8, 1925, as John Uhler Lemmon III to a life of privilege as the oly child of a business executive and a Boston socialite, Lemmon still felt himself an outsider. His choice of a career, he said, "had nothing to do with talent. It had everything to do with being accepted."

During a half century of work on the stage and screen, Lemmon earned the highest awards his peers and the public could give. In addition to his Oscars, he won a Golden Globe for a television version of "Inherit the Wind" in 1999 and two Cannes Film Festival Best Actor awards for "The China Syndrome" and "Missing." He also won an Emmy in 2000 for "Tuesdays with Morrie."

He was a recipient of the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award, and, as a Kennedy Center honoree in 1996, he was accorded one of the highest honors a nation could bestow.

The publicity for his first film "It Should Happen to You" in 1954 included the phrase "introducing Jack Lemmon, a guy you're gonna like." And it seems that nearly everyone did.

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