Jack Nicholson (b. 1937) — Biography & Facts

Jack Nicholson: The Grin That Ate American Cinema

In 1974, researchers at *Time* magazine digging through his background told him something his family had spent thirty-seven years concealing: the woman he believed was his sister was his mother, and the woman he called mother was his grandmother. Both were already dead. "A pretty dramatic event," he said, "but it wasn't what I'd call traumatizing." That same year he made *Chinatown*, a film about a man who discovers exactly that kind of secret and is destroyed by it.

The Family Secret

John Joseph Nicholson was born on April 22, 1937, in Neptune City, New Jersey, and grew up there and in Spring Lake. His mother, June Frances Nicholson, performed under the name June Nilson and died in 1963; his grandmother, who raised him as her own, died in 1970. The identity of his father was never settled — his biographer Patrick McGilligan proposed June's manager, Eddie King, rather than the showman Donald Furcillo. Nicholson has drawn one hard political conclusion from it: "I'm pro-choice but against abortion because I'm an illegitimate child myself, and it would be hypocritical to take any other position. I'd be dead."

He was voted Class Clown at Manasquan High School in 1954 and spent one entire school year in daily detention. At thirteen he had worked as an office assistant for Hanna and Barbera at MGM's cartoon studio; they offered him an animator's job and he turned it down. In 1957 he joined the California Air National Guard, by his own account to dodge the draft, and served as a firefighter at Van Nuys Airport.

Corman's Apprentice, and the Typewriter

His debut was the title role in Roger Corman's *The Cry Baby Killer* in 1958. For a decade he was a working B-movie actor — *The Little Shop of Horrors*, *The Raven*, *The Terror* — and made Westerns with Monte Hellman that failed in America and found an audience in French art houses. When the acting stalled he wrote. He scripted *The Trip* for Corman in 1967 and co-wrote *Head* for the Monkees with Bob Rafelson.

His judgement on that decade was brutal: "All I could see in the early films, before *Easy Rider*, was this desperate young actor trying to vault out of the screen."

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Easy Rider, and the Year Everything Turned

The part of the alcoholic lawyer George Hanson had been written for Rip Torn, who walked after a fight with Dennis Hopper. Nicholson, who was on the production side helping secure financing, took it. The film cost $400,000 and grossed $60 million, and made him the counterculture's leading man overnight.

*Five Easy Pieces* in 1970 sealed it. Karen Black, who played opposite him, noted how far the subdued Bobby Dupea sat from the man himself: "I think that Jack really has very little in common with Bobby." He told his new agent to bring him only unusual work: "I like to play people that haven't existed yet, a 'cusp character'... once it becomes part of the conventional wisdom, it doesn't seem particularly adventurous."

The Seventies: Cusp Characters

*Carnal Knowledge* for Mike Nichols in 1971. *The Last Detail* for Hal Ashby in 1973, which took Best Actor at Cannes and drew from Roger Ebert the observation that "he creates a character so complete and so complex that we stop thinking about the movie and just watch to see what he'll do next." *Chinatown* for Roman Polanski in 1974, stepping deliberately into Bogart's shoes. Antonioni's *The Passenger* in 1975, which taught him a discipline he described in *Sight and Sound* that year as the director's simple instruction: "don't act, just say the lines and make the movements."

Then *One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest*, Miloš Forman's 1975 adaptation of the Ken Kesey novel, which won five Academy Awards and gave Nicholson the first of three.

Kubrick, the Joker, and the Second Act

Stanley Kubrick chose him for *The Shining* over Stephen King's objection that Jack Torrance should read as an everyman. Kubrick shot the ghostly bartender scene thirty-six times. "Stanley's demanding," Nicholson said. "He'll do a scene fifty times, and you have to be good to do that." Kubrick's verdict: "His work is always interesting, clearly conceived, and has the X-factor, magic. Jack is particularly suited for roles that require intelligence."

*Terms of Endearment* in 1983 won him a second Oscar, in supporting. Tim Burton's *Batman* in 1989 earned him between $60 and $90 million on a gross percentage, and he described the Joker himself as "a piece of pop art." *A Few Good Men* in 1992 gave him a tenth nomination and a line the culture never gave back. *As Good as It Gets* in 1997 brought the third Oscar. *About Schmidt* in 2002 and Scorsese's *The Departed* in 2006 were the last great ones.

Why Jack Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on a paradox: the most visibly extroverted screen actor of his era insists his real work is invisible. "There's probably no one who understands Method acting better academically than I do — or actually uses it more in his work," he told Sean Penn. "But nobody really sees that." The evidence for him is that serious people saw it anyway. Kubrick located it as intelligence. Mike Nichols placed him in a line — "There is James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, and Henry Fonda. After that, who is there but Jack Nicholson?" Ebert praised *Hoffa* specifically because "Nicholson is an actor who can reflect almost anything in his face. One reason his performance is so good as Hoffa is that he reveals almost nothing." The faculty, then, is control: an actor of enormous natural wattage who knows precisely how much to withhold, and does the calculation in real time.

The counter-case is that the withholding failed often enough to matter. Critics have repeatedly noted performances tipping into self-parody, and the grin became a brand that could be worn instead of a character. *Hoffa* drew a Razzie nomination alongside its Golden Globe nod. His final film, *How Do You Know* in 2010, was a critical and financial disaster. And a claim of hidden technique that "nobody really sees" is convenient precisely because it cannot be tested. What is testable is twelve Academy Award nominations — more than any other male actor — across five decades. In 1998 Nicholson met Fidel Castro and called *him* a genius. It is not a word he has ever spent on himself.

Eighty Films, Then Silence

He made eighty films between 1958 and 2010 and has not made one since, telling *Vanity Fair* in 2013 that he was not retired but no longer driven "to be out there anymore." He turned down *Doctor Sleep*. He holds three acting Oscars — tied with Day-Lewis, Streep and Brennan, one behind Hepburn — six Golden Globes, the AFI Life Achievement Award, the Kennedy Center Honors and a Moscow prize named for Stanislavsky. An Australian fishing spider carries his name, awarded in 2018 for "brilliantly portraying diverse personalities."