Trailer Premiere: Jerry Lewis Stars in 'Max Rose,' His First Lead Role in Two Decades
At 90 years young, comedy legend Jerry Lewis is returning to the big screen. The iconic nonagenarian stars as the titular widower in the upcoming drama Max Rose, a film that could trigger more tears than laughter (watch the exclusive trailer above).
Days before the death of Eva (Claire Bloom), his wife of 65 years, jazz pianist Max discovers that she had another man in her life. The news is just as shocking to his son (Kevin Pollak) and granddaughter (Kerry Bishé), and it leads Max on a journey to track down Eva’s secret lover, Ben (Dean Stockwell).
The trailer touts Max Rose as Lewis’s “most personal role of a lifetime.” It’s certainly a personal undertaking for writer-director Daniel Noah, who based Max and Eva on his own late grandparents.
Lewis, who shot to fame in the late-1940s as one half of the musical-comedy duo Martin and Lewis, before embarking on a solo career that included such classics as the Nutty Professor and The King of Comedy, hasn’t been seen or heard from much in recent years. In fact, Max Rose is Lewis’s first lead role since 1995’s comic tale Funny Bones, in which he costarred with Oliver Platt.
Max Rose, rough footage of which previously debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, opens in New York on Sept. 2, in LA on Sept. 9, and then nationwide through September and October.
