NICHOLSON, Jack

(b. 22 April 1937 in Neptune, New Jersey), actor, director, and screenwriter often described as the most charismatic and talented actor of his generation, winner of two Academy Awards for best actor and one for best supporting actor; recipient of several Academy Award nominations and other prestigious international prizes for his performances.

Nicholson's family background was recently defined as "a mystery with as many false clues as Chinatown," the 1974 Roman Polanski film in which Nicholson starred. Nicholson, the son of June Nicholson, an unwed, teenaged mother, was raised by his grandparents, Ethel May, a beauty parlor owner, and John Nicholson, a sign painter. He had one half-sister. When Nicholson was very young, his grandfather left the family. Nicholson attended high school in Neptune, New Jersey. At the age of seventeen, he traveled to California. Despite his plans to return East to attend college, he landed a job as an office boy in MGM's animation department. In 1957, while in Los Angeles, Nicholson studied acting with Jeff Corey, one of the foremost acting instructors in Hollywood at that time; Nicholson also worked as an actor with the Players Ring Theatre.

Nicholson's debut as an actor happened on the fringes of the American film industry, where he was confined for the whole decade of the 1960s. He played alienated bikers or psychotic characters in horror films, a genre to which he later returned as an established star with Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) and more grotesquely with George Miller's The Witches of Eastwick (1987) and Mike Nichols's Wolf (1994). Only when the values of the counterculture became more widely disseminated in American society was Nicholson able to achieve celebrity status. He was in his thirties when he finally became a star, a relatively late age for an actor endowed with his magnetism.

Nicholson's first film appearance is connected to the legendary producer and director of low-budget films, Roger Corman, who cast him in the title role of Cry Baby Killer (1958). After appearing in Irving Lerner's Studs Lonigan(1960), an unsuccessful adaptation of James T. Farrell's radical immigrant saga, Nicholson continued to star in Corman's features for the next few years. He played a masochistic dental patient in Little Shop of Horrors (1960), followed by the role of Peter Lorre's troubled son in The Raven (1963), and finally costarred in The Terror (1963) with Boris Karloff. Nicholson subsequently acted in three features by Monte Hellman, another cult figure on the periphery of American cinema. He also wrote the script for Corman's hallucinogenic classic, The Trip (1968), and cowrote the cult movie, The Head. On 17 June 1962 Nicholson married Sandra Knight; the couple had one daughter before divorcing on 8 August 1968.

The films of the 1960s did little to enhance Nicholson's reputation, which underwent a major upsurge when, after turning down a role in Bonnie and Clyde, he replaced Rip Torn to play the character of George Hanson, a southern lawyer, in another countercultural cinematic manifesto, Easy Rider (1969). The incredible success of this road movie, enhanced by Nicholson's captivating, Academy Award–nominated performance as a drop-out lawyer, made Nicholson an icon of nonconformity for the Beatles-generation audiences who flocked to see this landmark feature of the New Hollywood. After the disappointing experience of Vincente Minnelli's On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970), in which his role was almost completely edited out, Nicholson starred in Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces (1970), the film that assured his stardom. In this ideal epilogue to Easy Rider and the whole 1960s decade, Nicholson played the role of the former musician, Bobby Eroica Dupea, an older dropout than the other characters portrayed in Easy Rider, alienated from his own family and society as a whole. Dupea's journey northward to Alaska ends not in self-discovery but in a metaphorical death, making him yet another contemporary American male character marked by lack of identity and impotence. Nicholson revisited such depictions in many of his later films, from Mike Nichols's Carnal Knowledge (1971) to Michelangelo Antonioni's complex Professione Reporter (The Passenger, 1975). Costarring Karen Black and Susan Anspach (with whom Nicholson had a relationship and allegedly a son, born in 1970), Five Easy Pieces earned Nicholson his second Academy Award nomination, and his diner scene is a classic in film history.

By the end of the 1960s, which he began in relative obscurity, Nicholson had become an embodiment of the decade's dissatisfaction with the status quo. However, the challenges that Nicholson's characters bring to social conventions prove unsuccessful because of a typically American individualism and a consequent unwillingness to form attachments. In this light Dupea's final journey to Alaska in Five Easy Pieces should be read as an inversion of the myth of the road, a reestablishment of the American fascination with the frontier, to which Nicholson had contributed the year before, with Easy Rider. Although Dupea invokes Huck Finn, "lighting out for the territory," he is no adolescent, and his final journey is intended as an illustration of his own failures.

Nicholson's best performances of the 1970s were built on his maverick persona established at the end of the 1960s, climaxing with his first Academy Award as the asylum patient Randall McMurphy in Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). Like the private eye Jake Gittes in Polanski's stylish Chinatown (1974) or the sailor Billy Budduskey in Hal Ashby's The Last Detail (1973), ex-marine McMurphy is able to grasp the social injustices of his world but unable to confront them effectively.

In the early 1970s Nicholson started a seventeen-year relationship with Anjelica Huston, with whom he starred in John Huston's successful Mafia comedy, Prizzi's Honor (1985). The relationship ended in 1990 when Nicholson had a daughter with actress Rebecca Broussard. Broussard and Nicholson also had a son in 1992.

Even when his films were critical and commercial disasters and disappointed expectations, as in the case of Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks (1976), Nicholson's encounter with his role model Marlon Brando, Nicholson always remained immune to damage. Over the decades he has continued to exert his charisma on different generations of moviegoers, in spite of his turning down roles in important films such as The Godfather (1972), The Sting (1973), and Apocalypse Now (1979). Through the decades his cinematic persona has undergone a considerable change from the one he created during the 1960s and used so successfully during the early 1970s. Terms of Endearment (1983) and As Good As It Gets (1997), both directed by James L. Brooks, epitomize this shift. The two films, which gave Nicholson his second and third Academy Awards, portray a disreputable, middle-aged hero who is a significant departure from Nicholson's psychotic characters and alienated rebels. Both Garrett Breedlove (Terms of Endearment) and Melvin Udall (As Good as it Gets) are comic figures, devoid of the pathos of Nicholson's early characters. They are outsiders at the beginning of the filmic narrative, yet by the conclusion of both movies, they have been transformed into sensitive and more functional human beings.

Much like his characters, Jack Nicholson has successfully moved from the margins to the very center of the American film industry. Patrick McGilligan's biography of Nicholson speaks of the transition he has undergone, from the hero of the rebellious 1960s to the embodiment of social upward mobility and the rags-to-riches myth: "Jack Nicholson, one of the most accomplished actors and greatest motion picture stars of our time, is a success story as American as that of the log-splitter who became President."

Nicholson has been the subject of several biographies, including Robert David Crane and Christopher Fryer, Jack Nicholson—Face to Face (1975); David Downing, Jack Nicholson: A Biography (1984); two film biographies, Didier Sandre, Jack Nicholson (1981) and John Parker, The Joker's Wild: The Biography of Jack Nicholson (1991); Donald Shepherd, Jack Nicholson: An Unauthorized Biography (1991); and Patrick McGilligan, Jack's Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson (1996). Critical studies include NormanDickens, Jack Nicholson: The Search for a Superstar (1975); Bruce Braith-waite, The Films of Jack Nicholson (1977); Douglas Brode, The Films of Jack Nicholson (1990); and Mikita Brottman, ed., Jack Nicholson: Movie Top Ten (2000).

Luca Prono