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
Avanti! adapting the Taylor play. Wilder was determined to create "a bittersweet love story, a little like "Brief Encounter", which I always admired," he later recalled. Early in the writing period, Wilder showed Jack Lemmon some of the completed script, and he agreed to play Wendell Armbruster, Jr. "Knowing pretty early on Jack was going to be in our film made it more comfortable writing his dialogue," said Diamond, who preferred to tailor a screenplay to a specific actor. Wilder was familiar with Juliet Mills from the television sitcom "Nanny and the Professor", and while he was unimpressed with the series