Jack Nicholson is perhaps Hollywood’s most celebrated living legend, a true star who has rarely denied the opportunity to do serious work over fluffy commercial fare. Still a major box office draw today, Nicholson has starred in American classics for five decades and has earned an astonishing twelve Academy Award nominations.
Born in New York City on April 22, 1937, Nicholson was raised by his grandparents in Manasquan, New Jersey where he attended high school. However, Nicholson grew up believing that his grandparents were in fact his birth parents and that his mother was his much-older sister. His real mother is in fact June Frances Nicholson, a New York dancer. Because she was not married, June’s parents insisted that they raise the child in order for her to focus on her career. The young Jack didn’t find out about his real mother until 1974 when a TIME Magazine writer discovered the discrepancy while researching a feature on him, years after both his grandparents and mother were dead. The identity of Nicholson’s birth father has been the subject of debate, though Nicholson himself has frequently said he is not interested in pursuing the matter.
His first major role was in Roger Corman’s delightfully morbid B-movie “The Little Shop of Horrors”, which proved so popular that it later inspired a hugely successful musical and subsequent film adaptation. Nicholson’s early period, which spanned the 60s, was peppered with Corman’s B-movies, among them “The Raven” and “The Terror”. Few of his meatier dramatic roles from the 60s have been rediscovered since his rise to superstardom in 1969, as many of them were in mostly unmemorable hippie-inspired road movies. Nonetheless, Nicholson did star in two notable Monte Hellman westerns, “The Shooting” and “Ride in the Whirlwind”.
Fittingly, it was a drug-addled road movie that propelled Nicholson to major stardom, 1969’s enormously popular “Easy Rider”. Earning his first Oscar nomination, Nicholson played third-wheel to Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in the counterculture classic, which against all odds turned out brilliantly despite one of the most notoriously turbulent productions in history. “Easy Rider” is a hugely important picture in Hollywood history, as it was critical in paving the way for 70s auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, and Francis Ford Coppola to make expensive, highly personal artistic projects with gargantuan industry backing. Nicholson was perhaps the most important on-screen star of the period, with highlights including “Five Easy Pieces”, “The Last Detail”, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, “Carnal Knowledge”, “Chinatown”, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s hypnotic “The Passenger”.
Though Nicholson hasn’t topped his work from the 70s, it was everyone else’s best decade as well. Still, nearly all of his work since has been extraordinary, from “Terms of Endearment”, “The Shining”, and “Reds” to Tim Burton’s “Batman” and the Tom Cruise match-up “A Few Good Men”. His recent work includes the Oscar-winning “As Good as It Gets”, Sean Penn’s “The Pledge”, “About Schmidt”, and his hilarious turn with Diane Keaton in “Something’s Gotta Give”. Nicholson is on screen for the first time in three years with Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed”, passing the torch along to young stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and Mark Wahlberg.