Susan Anspach
Actress who made Five Easy Pieces with Jack Nicholson and later sued him for breach of promise
SUSAN ANSPACH, who has died aged 75, was a willowy blonde actress of the 1970s who specialised in highlystrung rebellious women of the sort who, as she put it: “Tell a guy to go to hell unless he behaves himself ”; as her career faded, she made the headlines by filing a breach of promise suit against the actor Jack Nicholson, with whom she co-starred in Five Easy Pieces (1970) and with whom she had a son.
Her other credits included Play It Again, Sam (1972), in which she played Woody Allen’s leather-jacketed ex-wife who has left him for a biker; “I don’t feel any rapport with you, and I don’t dig you physically,” she tells him, before adding, “Don’t take it personal.” In Blume in Love (1973) she was the wife whom George Segal divorces before realising that he still loves her and trying to win her back by fair means and foul.
In Five Easy Pieces, Susan Anspach played a young pianist who begins an affair with Nicholson’s surly oil-rig worker despite being engaged to his brother. Nicholson is said to have fallen for the actress after she licked a piece of carrot from his cup of vegetable soup. “You’re not an intellectual,” he told her. “You’re a f-----sensualist, like me.”
“It wasn’t lust or even love at first sight,” Susan Anspach recalled, but “the sexual energy we had at work carried over into our private lives.”
While she had no illusions that Nicholson wanted a long-term relationship, she later claimed that she had told him “I’m going to have a baby. I’d like you to be the father” and had given him “every chance to back out or use protection”. Her son, Caleb, was conceived, she reckoned, in her film set trailer on December 22 1969.
Their affair ended when filming finished and in 1970 Susan Anspach, by then pregnant, married another actor, Mark Goddard, who brought up Caleb, and her daughter by a previous relationship with a cast member of Hair, as his own. She did not tell Caleb who his real father was until he was seven, when she and Goddard were divorcing.
Subsequently Caleb made contact with Nicholson who, she claimed, bought him gifts and paid his university fees, but who failed to recognise him publicly.
In the late 1980s, as her film roles dried up, Susan Anspach asked Nicholson for help when she could no longer meet payments on the house in Santa Monica she had bought in 1979. Between 1988 and 1992, Nicholson was reported to have given or lent her nearly $500,000.
In 1994, however, relations took a downturn after Nicholson gave an interview to Vanity Fair in which he failed to acknowledge Caleb as his son. Susan Anspach fired off a letter to the magazine, putting matters right, observing that “Since Jack and Caleb have a very warm relationship, and because Jack loves Caleb, I’m sure he would want me to have you make this correction.”
In fact Nicholson was so furious that he demanded she sell her home so that he could get his money back, with interest, and in early 1995 a company he owned began the process of foreclosure. Susan Anspach countered by suing Nicholson for breach of promise.
Nicholson claimed that he had lent her money because “I’m a humanitarian … I believe in being good and charitable to my fellow man.” But then came the questions in court. “Did you call her a miserable drunken bitch and indicate that she owed you money?” he was asked. Nicholson settled.
Susan Anspach was born in Queens, New York, on November 23 1942 to parents of Irish and German extraction. She went on to study music and drama at the Catholic University of America in Washington, then spent a year at the Actors’ Studio alongside Al Pacino and Rip Torn.
She made her stage debut in a 1965 off-broadway production of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge, and in 1967, in an off-broadway production of Hair, she played Sheila, the college activist and love interest of the two main male characters. She also made brief appearances in Broadway shows.
Her first film role was in Hal Ashby’s
The Landlord (1970). Five Easy Pieces was her second feature. In Dusan Makavejev’s 1981 film, Montenegro, she impressed as the bored wife of a Swedish businessman who finds sexual liberation with a bunch of Yugoslav immigrants.
But, though she continued to work, good roles proved few and far between. When she appeared in the Canadian “fuel shortage comedy” Gas (1981), her co-star, Sterling Hayden, told her: “You’re good. What are you doing this for?”
But, as she observed: “I would see things in fan magazines that said ‘Oh you remember Susan Anspach, the woman who threw out George Segal, Woody Allen and Jack Nicholson all in one fell swoop?’ The whole country’s in love with Jack and George and Woody, and I’m the one who’s remembered for going ‘Get lost, buddy.’”
A second marriage, to the musician Sherwood Ball, also ended in divorce. She is survived by her son and daughter.
Susan Anspach, born November 23 1942, died April 2 2018