Jack Nicholson

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Jack Nicholson at Cannes, (2001)
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Jack Nicholson at Cannes, (2001)

Jack Nicholson (born John Joseph Nicholson April 22, 1937) is a highly successful, iconic American method actor known for his often dark, comedic portrayals of neurotic characters. He received Kennedy Center Honors in 2001, and has been nominated for an Academy Award a dozen times, winning three of them. He has also won seven Golden Globe Awards.

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Personal Life

He was born in St. Vincent's Hospital, New York City the son of Italian-American showman Don Furcillo-Rose and June Frances Nicholson, a dancer and showgirl of English and Irish descent who married on October 16, 1936 in Elkton, Maryland, while Furcillo-Rose was still married to another woman. When June discovered that Furcillo-Rose was a bigamist, she became distraught, and as a result Jack was brought up by his grandparents Joseph and Ethel Nicholson in Neptune, New Jersey and was told that they were his parents, and that his real mother June was his sister. He attended high school at nearby Manasquan High School, where a drama award was ultimately named in his honor. Nicholson only discovered that his sister was in fact his mother in 1974 after being informed by a journalist who was doing a feature on him, after both his mother and grandmother had died (in 1963 and 1970). Nicholson is personally anti-abortion: "I'm very contra my constituency in terms of abortion because I'm positively against it. I don't have the right to any other view. My only emotion is gratitude, literally, for my life".

In his adult personal life, Nicholson has been notorious for his inability to "settle down". He is known to have at least five children by four different mothers despite only being married once. He has been romantically linked to numerous actresses and models for decades. Nicholson's longest relationship was for 17 years to actress Anjelica Huston but he fathered two children by two other women during that span. The power couple split after the second pregnancy was discovered. In 1999, Nicholson got into a minor car accident in Hollywood Hills which triggered another personal scandal when it was discovered that his passenger in the car was actress Lara Flynn Boyle who was thought to be David Spade's girlfriend at the time. Oddly, Boyle fled the scene to avoid the love triangle even though the Mercedes-Benz Nicholson wrecked was her mother's.

Acting Career

Nicholson started his career as an actor, writer, and producer, working for and with Roger Corman. This included his screen debut in The Cry Baby Killer (1958), where he played a juvenile delinquent who panics after shooting two other teenagers, and Little Shop of Horrors, in which he had a small role as a masochistic dental patient.

His work with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper on the LSD-fueled The Trip led to his real break. That film led to a small supporting role in Easy Rider (1969), for which he received his first Oscar nomination. A Best Actor nomination came the following year for his persona-defining role in Five Easy Pieces (1970), which includes his famous chicken salad dialogue about getting what you want.

DVD cover of The Shining showing Nicholson as the psychotic caretaker Jack Torrance
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DVD cover of The Shining showing Nicholson as the psychotic caretaker Jack Torrance

Other early movies he is known for include Hal Ashby's The Last Detail (1973), Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), for which he received his first Oscar, and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Nicholson won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Terms of Endearment (1983).

The 1989 Batman, where Nicholson played the supervillain The Joker, was an international smash hit, and a lucrative percentage deal earned Nicholson about $50 million [1].

For his role as hotheaded Col. Nathan R. Jessep in A Few Good Men (1992), a dark movie about a murder in a US Marine Corps unit, he received yet another nomination by the Academy. This film contains Nicholson's "You can't handle the truth!" scene, which has since become widely known and imitated.

Not all of Nicholson's performances are praised; his take on the U.S. President in Mars Attacks! (1996) was widely criticized for being over-the-top and unfunny.

Nicholson would go on to win his next Oscar for his role as the neurotic lead in the romance As Good as It Gets (1997).

The September 11, 2001 attacks led Nicholson to focus on comedies. In About Schmidt (2002), Nicholson portrayed a retired Omaha, Nebraska insurance man who questions his own life and the death of his wife shortly afterward. The deeply emotional, slow film stands in sharp contrast to many of his previous roles. In the comedy Anger Management, he plays an aggressive therapist alongside Adam Sandler. His most recent film is the 2003 Something's Gotta Give.

Nicholson will return to villainous form as a tough Boston mob boss presiding over Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006).

Trivia

Nicholson is also a well-known and highly visible fan of the NBA's Los Angeles Lakers; he has courtside seats. It is in his contract that he does not film movies during Laker games. When he is at a televised Lakers game, he is invariably sought out for celebrity camera shots during one or more breaks in the game. While he used to be often accompanied by a girlfriend, he can usually be seen with one of his young children now.

In 1998, after Nicholson visited Cuba and had a three hour conversation with Fidel Castro, he told Daily Variety that, "He is a genius." According to former Cuban intelligence officer Delfin Fernandez, Nicholson's hotel room, in Cuba, was bugged with both video and audio recording devices at the instruction of Castro.

He is known to his friends as Pickles.

Filmography

For more details on this topic, see List of Jack Nicholson films.

External links

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