The rumours early this week sparked accolades for a long and storied career; Jack Nicholson was retiring, the papers read. He couldn't remember his lines anymore; the end of an era.
Nicholson himself just recently laughed off those rumours and denied mental decline - "I have a mathematician's brain," he said. But it wouldn't be the first time his career in front of the cameras seemed dead.
In the late 1960s, according to Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: "Nicholson's acting career appeared to be over." Having got his start in a series of low-budget exploitation pictures directed and produced by Roger Corman and his acolytes with titles like The Cry Baby Killer and The Terror, Nicholson had been unable to transition into larger or more prominent roles. Instead, he was hanging out with producer Bert Schneider at the offices of his production company, Raybert, and attending Los Angeles Lakers basketball games with him, where the two men made themselves conspicuous by not standing for the national anthem. Nicholson was also spending time partying with director Bob Rafelson, using one such celebration to come up with the idea for an LSD-dented, phantasmagorical film vehicle for none other than The Monkees.
Then an angry Dennis Hopper pulled a steak knife on his Easy Rider co-star Rip Torn as Torn and Peter Fonda sat around the latter's Manhattan town house. After disarming him, Torn dropped out of the picture. The role of burnt-out lawyer George Hanson was now available, and Nicholson was cast, as much as an intermediary between the film's bickering co-stars as a performer. The actor with the "attractive, humorous but sceptical face, pleased to make people laugh", as David Thomson describes him, ran off with the picture nonetheless, which became one of the biggest successes of 1969, and a landmark film of both the counterculture and the American New Wave. Nicholson would go on to become one of the defining performers of his generation, and one of the few actors to be handed three Academy Awards. "When I was sitting in the screening," Nicholson said about Easy Rider in a 2011 interview, "I realised that I was actually going to be a movie star."
Nicholson was born in 1937 in Neptune, New Jersey. His father was an alcoholic who left the family when Jack was two years old. His mother owned a beauty salon. At 17, Nicholson went out to California to visit his sister, and fell in love with Hollywood. He found a job in MGM's cartoon department, and went on to study acting at the Players Ring Theater.
The triumph of Easy Rider brought Nicholson, now in his early 30s, his first Oscar nomination (11 more would follow), and a shot at starring roles. His one-time screenwriting collaborator Rafelson cast him in his next movie, Five Easy Pieces (1970), as a gifted pianist-turned-oil roughneck, crowing all the while about his coup. "I thought I was real lucky," said Rafelson. "I had bagged into a guy who didn't even know he was .[an] actor." Nicholson went on to a remarkable streak of memorable roles in the early- and mid-1970s, following Five Easy Pieces with The Last Detail (1973), Chinatown (1974) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), which brought him his first Academy Award for Best Actor.
Never a sex symbol or a romantic icon, the late bloomer proved more durable than some of his more conventionally handsome colleagues. "I'm an actor who they said was wrinkled and balding and everything else when I was in my early 30s," Nicholson told an interviewer in 2002. "Most of the people who wrote that who thought they were younger than me are now bald and wrinkled."
Chinatown, directed by Roman Polanski and containing perhaps Nicholson's most indelible performance, was about private detective Jake Gittes, who stumbles upon a secret incestuous relationship between Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) and her father, producing a daughter who believed her mother was her sister. In perhaps the strangest life-imitating-art plot twist in the history of film, Nicholson discovered, after wrapping Chinatown, that the woman that he had grown up thinking of as his older sister - the one he had come out to Los Angeles to visit - was actually his mother, and the woman who had raised him was his grandmother.
Nicholson took to stardom as if his long sojourn in the Hollywood wilderness had never occurred. "Success," said Biskind of Nicholson, "meant never having to pay for yourself." Nevertheless, he purchased a home on Mulholland Drive near Marlon Brando's, and covered its walls with paintings by Matisse, Picasso and Warhol. He would eventually purchase Brando's home, too, and demolish it.
Nicholson is as famous for his grinning-satyr public persona as his acting work, known for his ever-present black sunglasses and permanently arched eyebrows. In a 1998 Rolling Stone interview, Nicholson said that the sunglasses were a form of protection against the onslaught of photographers that dogged his every step. "Even with the sunglasses on, I can't see where I'm going with these flashbulbs."
Contrary to what his image might suggest, Nicholson says that acting is still a stressful affair for him. The hardest part of playing a lovelorn astronaut in Terms of Endearment (1983), for which he won his second Oscar, was exposing his flabby stomach. "I have a lot of vanity," he told Roger Ebert in 1983. "When I stuck the old gut out there in the crucial scene, I had doubts about it on the set when I did it, and in the editing, and last night at the premiere I had a lot of doubts, and I was wondering if for my next picture I should play Tarzan."
Stardom was easy; acting was nerve-racking business. "I worry from the moment I take a job," he told The Daily Mail in 2011. "I worry about how I'm going to do it, if I can do it. I try to work out what I have to do on set and how I do that. I get extremely anxious. I panic. I can't get it. It happens every time, and I get myself into this state, and then I walk on set and the director says 'Roll', and all of a sudden all of it disappears and it's all happening, and I relax and I'm doing what I do and I'm not even thinking about it. And I relax up until the moment they yell 'Cut'."
Nicholson has five children by four different mothers. Married once, in the 1960s, Nicholson is best known for his romances with younger actresses Anjelica Huston, Rebecca Broussard and Lara Flynn Boyle. "I've had everything a man could ask for, but I don't know if anyone could say I'm successful with affairs of the heart," Nicholson told The Daily Mail. "I've been in love in my life, but it always starts with obsession that lasts exactly 18 months and then it changes. If I'd known and been prepared for that, I may have been able to orchestrate the whole relationship thing better." The famously hot-tempered actor has also got himself into legal trouble, most memorably in 1994, when he was charged with assault and vandalism for smashing the windshield of a Mercedes with a golf club after being cut off in traffic.
Nicholson would go on to win a third Oscar for his role as a curmudgeonly writer and coffee shop habitué in James L Brooks's As Good As It Gets (1997). (After winning a Golden Globe that year for the same performance, he told the audience that the prize would give him licence for another 10 years of misbehaviour.) But much of his later acting appeared to be swallowed by his persona, with Nicholson seemingly unable to play anyone other than the wolfishly grinning "Jack" familiar from his courtside seats at Laker games and his front-row perch at the Oscars.
Even celebrated performances, such as his turn as a Boston mob leader in Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006), felt at odds with the movies in which they were encased, as if Nicholson was now too large to be contained in any fictional universe. The Guardian called out director Martin Scorsese for having "allowed the actor to ham it up something rotten in The Departed, capsizing that movie in the process."
In response to the past week's rumours, Nicholson himself said that he has simptly lacked the drive to seek out new film roles in recent years. But, in truth, the question is moot; Nicholson has not played a role other than himself for some time now.
