Jack Nicholson

• 1. Introduction

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  Jack Nicholson improvised a single line for a 1980 horror film, and it outlived almost everything else he ever filmed. "Here's Johnny!" was not in Stanley Kubrick's script for The Shining. Nicholson invented it on the spot, playing writer Jack Torrance, drawing on his own life as a writer who slept short hours to stay agitated through the shoot. He shot one scene with a ghostly bartender 36 times. "Stanley's demanding," he said. "He'll do a scene fifty times, and you have to be good to do that."

  John Joseph Nicholson was born on the 22nd of April 1937 in Neptune City, New Jersey. He became one of the most decorated actors of the 20th century, holding 12 Academy Award nominations, the most of any male actor in the Academy's history. He won three of them. Yet the man who specialized in charismatic rebels grew up inside a lie about who he was. How did a boy voted Class Clown become an actor critics measured against Brando and Dean? Why did he turn down a job animating cartoons? And what did Time magazine reveal to him in 1974 that he called "a pretty dramatic event"? The answers run through five decades of film, a family secret, and a rivalry with a hammer under the pillow.

• 2. The Family Secret

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  June Frances Nicholson was 17 and unmarried when her son was born, so her parents raised the boy as their own. June, a showgirl who performed under the stage name June Nilson, played the role of his sister instead of his mother. The arrangement held for decades. The woman Nicholson believed was another sister, Lorraine, was in fact his aunt.

  In 1974, researchers at Time magazine pieced the truth together and told Nicholson directly. By then both his mother and his grandmother had died, in 1963 and 1970. He could not ask either of them about it. "It wasn't what I'd call traumatizing," he said. "I was pretty well psychologically formed."

  June's romantic history left the question of paternity unsettled. She married the Italian-American showman Donald Furcillo, who performed as Donald Rose, in 1936, before learning he was already married. Biographer Patrick McGilligan suggested in his book Jack's Life that June's manager, the Latvian-born Eddie King, may have been the biological father. Other accounts say June herself was unsure. Nicholson's own sense of identity settled on his heritage rather than the missing name. He has identified as Irish, comparing himself to the playwright Eugene O'Neill, whom he would later play on screen: "I'm not saying I'm as dark as he was... but I am a writer, I am Irish, I have had problems with my family." That comparison would surface again in a 1981 film about an American radical.

• 3. From Cartoons To Corman

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  Nicholson first reached California in 1950, at age 13, to visit the woman he then thought was his sister. He took an office job with the animation directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera at the MGM cartoon studio. They offered him an entry-level post as an animator. He turned it down. He wanted to act.

  the 5th of May 1955, was his first day as a working actor, on the television series Tales of Wells Fargo. He counted the date as lucky. The number 5 was the jersey number of his boyhood idol, the baseball player Joe DiMaggio. He trained with a group called the Players Ring Theater, then took small parts on stage and in television soap operas. His film debut came in the low-budget teen drama The Cry Baby Killer in 1958, where he played the title role.

  Roger Corman became his frequent collaborator over the next decade. Corman directed him as the masochistic dental patient Wilbur Force in The Little Shop of Horrors, in The Raven, in The Terror as a French officer seduced by an evil ghost, and in The St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Nicholson also worked with director Monte Hellman on low-budget westerns. Two of them, Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting, failed to interest American distributors but found cult success on the French art-house circuit. With his acting career foundering, Nicholson seemed resigned to working behind the camera. His first taste of writing success was the screenplay for the 1967 counterculture film The Trip, directed by Corman and starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. That partnership with Fonda and Hopper would soon hand him the role that changed everything.

• 4. Overnight Antihero

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  Easy Rider was written for Rip Torn, who walked away after an argument with Dennis Hopper. The vacancy went to Nicholson, who played the alcoholic lawyer George Hanson and earned his first Oscar nomination. The 1969 film cost only $400,000 to make and grossed $60 million. Biographer John Parker placed Nicholson's antihero turn in the lineage of James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, calling it an "overnight number-one hero of the counter-culture movement."

  Nicholson saw the break for what it was. "All I could see in the early films, before Easy Rider, was this desperate young actor trying to vault out of the screen and create a movie career." Stanley Kubrick, impressed, cast him as Napoleon in a planned biographical film. Production began, then collapsed, partly due to a change in ownership at MGM.

  Five Easy Pieces arrived in 1970 and became his persona-defining role. He played Bobby Dupea, an oil rig worker, opposite Karen Black as his waitress girlfriend; both were nominated for Academy Awards. Black said the now-classic restaurant scene was partly improvised, and out of character for Bobby, who would not have cared enough to argue with a waitress. "I think that Jack really has very little in common with Bobby," she said. "Jack is a very curious, alive human being. Always ready for a new idea." Nicholson agreed: "I like listening to everybody. This to me is the elixir of life." Within a month the film made him a leading man, and his name became, in his words, a brand: "You become Campbell's soup, with thirty-one different varieties of roles you can play."

• 5. Building The Persona

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  Mike Nichols directed Nicholson in the 1971 comedy-drama Carnal Knowledge, alongside Art Garfunkel, Ann-Margret, and Candice Bergen. Nichols ranked him with the greats: "There is James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, and Henry Fonda. After that, who is there but Jack Nicholson?" Nicholson and Garfunkel struck up a lifelong friendship; Garfunkel later stayed in a room at Nicholson's home that the actor jokingly called "the Arthur Garfunkel Suite."

  Hal Ashby's The Last Detail in 1973 won Nicholson the Best Actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Critic Roger Ebert praised the performance above the film itself: "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."

  Roman Polanski's 1974 noir Chinatown cast Nicholson as the private detective Jake Gittes, opposite Faye Dunaway and John Huston. Ebert read the role as a turning point. "As Jake Gittes, he stepped into Bogart's shoes," Ebert wrote. "From Gittes forward, Nicholson created the persona of a man who had seen it all and was still capable of being wickedly amused." The method, oddly, was something he hid. "I consider it an accomplishment because there's probably no one who understands Method acting better academically than I do," he told Sean Penn. "But it's funny, nobody really sees that. It's perception versus reality, I guess." That capacity to be both menacing and amused would carry him into a mental hospital and an Oscar.

• 6. Three Oscars

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  Randle P. McMurphy gave Nicholson his first Best Actor win in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1975. The adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel, directed by Milos Forman and co-produced by Michael Douglas, took five Academy Awards from nine nominations. Forman let Nicholson improvise through much of the film, including the group therapy sequences. Playing a fellow patient was Danny DeVito in an early role; Nicholson later learned DeVito had grown up in the same part of New Jersey and knew many of the same people.

  Garrett Breedlove, a retired astronaut, brought the second Oscar in James L. Brooks's Terms of Endearment in 1983, opposite Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger. McGilligan called it one of Nicholson's most complex characters and described his acting as "Jack floating like a butterfly."

  Melvin Udall, a mean-spirited novelist with obsessive-compulsive disorder, completed the trio in As Good as It Gets in 1997, his third film with Brooks. "I'm a studio Method actor, so I was prone to give some kind of clinical presentation of the disorder," he said. His co-star Helen Hunt won Best Actress, and the film grossed $314 million, his second-best-grossing after Batman. "It wasn't even what we said," Hunt said of their chemistry. "It was just some frequency we both could tune into." Three wins tied Nicholson with Walter Brennan, Ingrid Bergman, Meryl Streep, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Frances McDormand. Only Katharine Hepburn, with four, has won more.

• 7. Range Beyond The Wins

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  Marlon Brando drew Nicholson to a less sympathetic part in Arthur Penn's 1976 western The Missouri Breaks, taken specifically to work alongside the actor he idolized. As a young assistant manager at a theater, Nicholson had watched On the Waterfront about 40 times. "He's always been the patron saint of actors," he said. The two would later live next door to each other on Mulholland Drive in Beverly Hills, a stretch nicknamed "Bad Boy Drive" because Warren Beatty lived nearby too.

  Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger in 1975 sent Nicholson to Algeria, Spain, Germany, and England as a journalist who steals a dead man's identity. He thought so highly of the result that he bought the world rights. Critic Penelope Gilliatt called his work "a wonder of insight" and asked how he could "animate a personality that is barely there."

  Tim Burton's Batman in 1989 turned Nicholson's Joker into one of the defining performances of his career. A box-office deal gave him a share of the gross estimated between $60 million and $90 million. He called the role "a piece of pop art" and said he was "particularly proud" of it. Ebert noted audiences sometimes had to remind themselves not to root for the villain. Col. Nathan R. Jessup in A Few Good Men in 1992 brought his tenth Oscar nomination; director Rob Reiner said Nicholson set the tone in rehearsals, forcing the other actors to raise their game. Frank Costello, the Boston mob boss in Martin Scorsese's The Departed in 2006, returned him to darker territory in a Best Picture winner.

• 8. The Man Off Screen

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  Six children by five women, married only once: that is the shape of Nicholson's private life. His single marriage, to The Terror co-star Sandra Knight, ran from 1962 to 1968, and produced a daughter born in 1963. His longest relationship was with the actress Anjelica Huston, from 1973 until 1990, an on-again, off-again romance that ended amid Rebecca Broussard's first pregnancy by him.

  Polanski's life collided with Nicholson's twice over. Nicholson had been friends with him before the Manson Family murdered Polanski's wife, Sharon Tate, and supported him afterward. Following her death, Nicholson began sleeping with a hammer under his pillow and took breaks from work to attend Manson's trial. In 1977, Polanski was arrested at Nicholson's home for the sexual assault of 13-year-old Samantha Geimer. Nicholson was out of town filming; Huston, who had recently broken up with him, had stopped by to collect belongings and told police she "had witnessed nothing untoward."

  The Los Angeles Lakers became a fixture of his public image. He took season tickets in 1970 and held courtside seats next to the opponents' benches, occasionally arguing with officials and once nearly ejected from a 2003 playoff game. He collects 20th-century and contemporary paintings, including works by Henri Matisse, Andy Warhol, and Jack Vettriano. He has called himself a "lifelong Irish Democrat," and explained his pro-choice stance through his own origins: "I'm against abortion because I'm an illegitimate child myself... I'd be dead. I wouldn't exist."

  How Do You Know, released in 2010, was a financial and critical failure, and it became Nicholson's last film role, bringing his filmography to 80 films. He reunited there with James L. Brooks, the director who had handed him two of his Oscars. In a Vanity Fair article in September 2013, he said he did not consider himself retired, only less driven to "be out there anymore."

  Directors kept coming, and he kept declining. Mike Flanagan approached him for a cameo in the 2019 Shining sequel Doctor Sleep; Nicholson declined with best wishes. Flanagan revealed he had also been sought for Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One in 2018. An English-language remake of Toni Erdmann opposite Kristen Wiig was announced in 2017, then abandoned.

  The rare appearances grew rarer still. He presented the Academy Award for Best Picture eight times, the last in 2013, when he co-presented with First Lady Michelle Obama. He turned up at the 40th anniversary of Saturday Night Live in 2015. The greatest frustration he ever named was a film he never made: a movie about Napoleon, whose rights he owned through the 1982 book The Murder of Napoleon. "I can't tell you how much I would like to make a movie about him," he told the critic William Arnold, "and how maddening it is not to be able to." On the 16th of February 2025, he made a rare appearance at SNL 50 to introduce Adam Sandler, who sang a tribute to the show.