On his deathbed, Edmund Gwenn was visited by his friend and fellow actor Jack Lemmon. Lemmon asked him whether it was difficult to face death. "Oh, it's hard, very hard indeed," Gwenn answered in a labored whisper, "but not as hard as doing comedy!"

[According to another version: "

[Jack Lemmon] visited the British actor Edmund Gwenn, suffering in a hospital. Gwenn is said to have lifted the flap on the oxygen tent and said, 'It's really tough to die.' And Lemmon responded, 'It's not as tough as doing comedy.'" Gwenn's quip may also be the source of a quotation variously attributed to Noel Coward, David Garrick, William Holden, Edmund Kean, Marcel Marceau, Groucho Marx, and Oscar Wilde: "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."]