Just last week, new paparazzi pictures caused a stir, showing screen legend Jack Nicholson (86) in an allegedly “disheveled” state on the balcony of his house. Before these recordings, the three-time Oscar-winning male actor in Hollywood history was last seen in public in October 2021, when he played a home game in Los Angeles with his son Ray Nicholson (31), who looks like his face of his beloved L.A. Lakers.
The unflattering pictures of the one-time superstar, who turns 86 today, caused concern across the internet. But as the British “Independent” reports, a number of social media users also expressed their support for Nicholson. “Jack Nicholson is still cooler than most of us,” it said, for example, or: “If you’re Jack Nicholson, you can look whatever you want”. One user summed up the photographic intrusion into the star’s privacy most aptly with the words: “Leave Jack Nicholson alone. He’s 85”.
Since the beginning of the corona pandemic, Nicholson has largely withdrawn from the public eye. He was last seen on the big screen in 2010. Nicholson appeared alongside much younger actors Reese Witherspoon (47), Paul Rudd (54) and Owen Wilson (54) in the little-regarded romantic comedy How Do You Know you think it’s love?” on. The film by director James L. Brooks (82), who previously helped Nicholson to win two Oscars, only grossed an underground $ 49 million on a reported budget of $ 120 million – and thus became a huge flop.
Since then, Nicholson has been in unofficial, unannounced retirement – a fact confirmed by his late Easy Rider co-star Peter Fonda (1940-2019) in 2017. In 2013 he had turned down the lead role in the six-time Oscar-nominated tragic comedy “Nebraska”, which subsequently went to Bruce Dern (86). For the comedy “St. Vincent” (2014), in the development of which Nicholson was involved, he is said to have recommended Bill Murray (72) himself.
A last planned film project fell through in 2017. Nicholson had already signed for a US remake of the German hit comedy “Toni Erdmann” (2016), but the planned project never became reality. So his great acting career ended in a very quiet way.
The star with the striking eyebrows and the diabolical smile had previously resided at the top of Hollywood’s Olympus for decades. Raised by his grandparents, he thought his mother, June Frances Nicholson (1918-1963), was his sister for many years. In 1955, when he was just 18, he got his first paid acting engagement in Hollywood. In the years that followed, he appeared in the Roger Corman films “The Little Shop of Horrors” (1960) and “The Terror” (1963). But his acting career was struggling, so Nicholson turned to screenwriting. He wrote the scripts for the hippie cult film “The Trip” (1967) and the psychedelic western “Ride in the Whirlwind” (1966), in which he also played the leading role.
The Hollywood star as we know it today was born just by chance. When actor Rip Torn (1931-2019) and “Easy Rider” star Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) got into a fight, producer Bert Schneider (1933-2011) suggested Nicholson for the role of alcoholic lawyer George Hanson instead – and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.
In the early 1970s, Nicholson went from strength to strength, garnering Oscar nominations for his breakthrough film Five Easy Pieces (1970), Hal Ashby’s (1929-1988) The Last Command (1973) and the noir masterwork Chinatown (1974) before winning his first Academy Award for Best Actor for Miloš Forman’s (1932-2018) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975).
In the following five years, Nicholson, who is also known for his excessive lifestyle, took it easy as an actor before he improvised the unforgettable dialogue line “Here’s Johnny” in 1980 for legendary director Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) in “The Shining” (1980). In 1984 he won his second Oscar – this time for “Best Supporting Actor” for “Adolescence”. Another Academy Award for Best Actor would follow in 1998 for his portrayal of misanthropic writer Melvin Udall in James L. Brooks’ comedy As Good As It Gets.
In between, Nicholson, who owns artworks by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Andy Warhol, is said to have earned more than $50 million for portraying the iconic villain the Joker in Tim Burton’s (64) “Batman” thanks to a lucrative profit sharing.
“As the current world situation unfolded with 9/11, I made a very conscious decision to really get into comedy,” Nicholson once told The Independent. Together with director James L. Brooks and comedian and actor Adam Sandler (56), he is said to have worked out the plan to make the audience smile in difficult times. “With the exception of ‘The Departed,’ I’ve done five or six comedies in a row since then,” Nicholson said in 2008.
Possibly the most charming of these comedies is ‘The Best Comes Last’ (2007) directed by Rob Reiner (76). Nicholson and Morgan Freeman (85) play two terminally ill men who work through their “bucket list” (the film’s original title) in the buddy comedy, which was also a considerable financial success with worldwide box office earnings of 175 million US dollars . In retrospect, a worthy end to Nicholson’s great acting career.
