Jack Nicholson

John Joseph Nicholson was born on April 22, 1937, in Neptune City, New Jersey, and grew up along the Jersey Shore in nearby Neptune and Spring Lake ^[1]. He was raised by June Nicholson's parents, John and Ethel May Nicholson, and grew up believing that Ethel May was his mother and that June, seventeen when he was born, was his older sister. The truth stayed hidden for decades. In 1974, while researchers for Time magazine were preparing a profile, Nicholson learned that June had been his biological mother all along. Both June and Ethel May had died by then, so he never had the chance to discuss it with either woman ^[2]. He has said in interviews that the revelation, arriving when he was already 37, did not shake his gratitude toward the family that raised him.

Ethel May supported the household by running a beauty parlor out of the family home. Nicholson attended Manasquan High School, where classmates voted him class clown, an early sign of the comic timing that would later sharpen his screen work ^[1]. He was a bright student but restless, more interested in sports and mischief than in formal study.

After graduating in 1954 he traveled to California to visit June, who had moved west, and decided to stay. He took a job as an office worker in the animation department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, sorting fan mail for the cartoon unit run by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. The studio surroundings pulled him toward performing, and he began training with the Players Ring Theater while picking up small acting jobs ^[3].

Nicholson's first film lead came in The Cry Baby Killer (1958), a low-budget crime picture produced by Roger Corman ^[3]. For roughly a decade afterward he worked steadily but obscurely in the Corman orbit, appearing in quickly made features such as The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), where he played a masochistic dental patient, and The Raven (1963) and The Terror (1963) alongside Boris Karloff. The pay was small and the schedules brutal, but the apprenticeship taught him every side of filmmaking.

During these lean years he also wrote. He supplied screenplays for the counterculture films The Trip (1967), which starred Peter Fonda, and co-wrote Head (1968), the surreal Monkees vehicle directed by Bob Rafelson ^[3]. His partnership with Rafelson and producer Bert Schneider at BBS Productions would soon reshape his career.

The turning point arrived almost by accident. When Rip Torn left the cast of Easy Rider (1969), Nicholson stepped into the role of George Hanson, a whiskey-drinking Southern lawyer who joins two bikers on their ride across America. The performance, funny and abruptly tragic, earned him his first Academy Award nomination and made him a face of the New Hollywood movement ^[4]. A year later he confirmed the breakthrough with Five Easy Pieces (1970), playing Bobby Dupea, an oil-rig worker fleeing his upper-class musical past. The film's diner scene, in which Bobby orders a chicken salad sandwich to get around a waitress's rules, became one of the most quoted moments in American cinema, and Nicholson collected a second Oscar nomination ^[4].

The 1970s belong among the strongest decades any American actor has assembled. Nicholson earned a nomination for The Last Detail (1973), playing a Navy signalman escorting a young sailor to prison, then starred as private detective J.J. Gittes in Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), a noir about water, corruption, and buried family crimes in 1930s Los Angeles. The role brought another Oscar nomination and remains a touchstone of the genre ^[4].

In 1975 he won his first Academy Award for Best Actor as Randle P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Milos Forman's adaptation of the Ken Kesey novel. The film swept the five major Oscars: picture, director, actor, actress, and screenplay, a feat achieved only twice before or since ^[5]. Nicholson's McMurphy, a convict feigning insanity who collides with the institutional cruelty of Nurse Ratched, gave the counterculture era its defining screen rebel.

He kept taking risks. In Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) he played Jack Torrance, a writer unraveling inside a snowbound hotel; the improvised line "Here's Johnny!" entered popular language ^[1]. A supporting turn as the retired astronaut Garrett Breedlove in Terms of Endearment (1983) won him a second Oscar, this time for Best Supporting Actor ^[5]. He was the Joker in Tim Burton's Batman (1989), a performance that helped the film become the year's biggest hit, and a decade of memorable work followed: the bellowing Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men (1992), and the obsessive-compulsive novelist Melvin Udall in As Good as It Gets (1997), which brought his third Academy Award ^[5]. Among Jack Nicholson achievements, the numbers are stark: twelve acting nominations, more than any other male performer in Academy history, and three wins ^[5]. He also directed three features, Drive, He Said (1971), Goin' South (1978), and The Two Jakes (1990), the sequel to Chinatown ^[3].

Nicholson has married once. He wed actress Sandra Knight in 1962; their daughter Jennifer was born in 1963, and the couple divorced in 1968 ^[2]. He never remarried, though his relationships drew steady press attention. His longest was with actress Anjelica Huston, an on-and-off partnership that lasted roughly seventeen years through the 1970s and 1980s ^[2]. He later had two children, Lorraine and Raymond, with actress Rebecca Broussard, and a daughter, Honey, with model Winnie Hollman ^[2].

Away from film sets, Nicholson became one of the most recognizable sports fans in America. He has held courtside season tickets to the Los Angeles Lakers since the early 1970s, and his presence at games in dark sunglasses became part of the team's home-court atmosphere ^[6]. He is also a serious art collector, with holdings that have included works by Picasso and Matisse, and a longtime resident of Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, where Marlon Brando was for years his neighbor ^[6].

Friends and interviewers have often noted the gap between the wild public persona and the private man, who reads widely and speaks carefully about acting craft. He was close to writer-director Robert Towne and to producer friends from the BBS years, loyalties that stretched across decades of Hollywood turnover ^[3].

Nicholson kept working selectively into his sixties and seventies. About Schmidt (2002) cast him against type as Warren Schmidt, a withdrawn Omaha retiree confronting widowhood and regret; the quiet performance earned him his twelfth Oscar nomination ^[5]. He played a mob boss in Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006), which won Best Picture, and paired with Morgan Freeman in the hit comedy The Bucket List (2007) ^[1].

His final screen appearance to date came in the romantic comedy How Do You Know (2010), directed by his frequent collaborator James L. Brooks ^[1]. Nicholson never announced a formal retirement, and he pushed back publicly against reports that memory problems had ended his career, but he has not accepted a role since. In later years he appeared occasionally at Lakers games and at the Academy Awards, where he had long been a fixture in the front row.

Honors accumulated. The American Film Institute gave him its Life Achievement Award in 1994, when he was, at 57, one of the youngest recipients. The Kennedy Center Honors followed in 2001, and in 2013 he received no further major film credits but remained, by wide agreement, the most nominated actor of his generation ^[5].

Who was Jack Nicholson to American movies? For many critics he is the emblematic actor of the New Hollywood, the performer whose arrival in Easy Rider announced that the studio era's polish had given way to something rougher and more truthful ^[4]. His characters tended to be outsiders pressing against institutions: the asylum, the Navy, the water bureau of Los Angeles, and audiences responded to the mixture of intelligence and volatility he brought to them.

The measurable record supports the reputation. Three Academy Awards, twelve acting nominations spanning five decades from 1969 to 2002, seven Golden Globe wins, and the AFI and Kennedy Center honors place him among the most decorated screen actors ever ^[5]. Only Katharine Hepburn, Meryl Streep, and a handful of others occupy comparable territory in Oscar history.

Yet the influence runs past awards. Generations of actors have studied his timing, the slow grin, the eyebrow arch, the sudden switch from charm to menace. Directors from Forman to Kubrick to Scorsese trusted him with characters other stars would have softened. Among the essential Jack Nicholson facts is this one: he worked for more than fifty years without ever quite becoming safe, and that refusal is the core of his legacy ^[1].