Download American Legends: The Life of Jack Lemmon AudioBook Free
"It's hard enough to write a good play, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's really hardest of most to write a play with comedy. Which is what life is." (Jack Lemmon) A whole lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of history's most important characters, but how much of the forest is lost for the trees and shrubs? In Charles River Editors' American Legends series, listeners can get swept up to accelerate on the lives of America's most significant men and women in the time it takes to complete a commute, while learning interesting facts long ignored 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 through the latter half of the 20th hundred years. For wealthy, poor, and working category audiences likewise, Lemmon was an accessible leading guy, someone certainly less stately than Cary Offer or Laurence Olivier and relatively more approachable even than archetypal leading men such as Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda. Audiences might not have known Lemmon on an individual level, yet his easygoing demeanor made it possible for the American consumer to feel like they understood Lemmon. His huge appeal is summarized effectively by Richard T. Stanley, who noted that he "Got the personality and flexible talent to star in any period." Lemmon became intimately associated with other famous characters of Hollywood, including director Billy Wilder and acting professional Walter Matthau. If Lemmon's persona was that of the everyman, the genuine narrative of his life tells a slightly different story.
