Jack Lemmon ham, a fine ham, and with ham you have to trim a little fat." The biography quotes Lemmon as saying, "I am particularly susceptible to the parts I play... If my character was having a nervous breakdown, I started to have one." He enjoyed longtime working relationships with both Blake Edwards, starring in "Days of Wine and Roses" (1962), "The Great Race" (1965) and "That's Life!" (1986), and Richard Quine, starring in "My Sister Eileen", "Operation Mad Ball", "Bell, Book and Candle", "It Happened to Jane", and "How to Murder Your Wife". Quine also directed Lemmon's screen test when the
Jack Lemmon a recovering alcoholic. Lemmon's production company JML produced "Cool Hand Luke" in 1967. Paul Newman was grateful to Lemmon for his support and offered him the role of the Sundance Kid, later played by Robert Redford in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid", but Lemmon turned it down. He did not like riding horses and he felt he'd already played too many aspects of the Sundance Kid's character before. Lemmon appeared in many films partnered with actor Walter Matthau. Among their pairings was 1968's "The Odd Couple", as Felix Ungar (Lemmon) and Oscar Madison (Matthau). The first film they starred