MY LIFE IN 10 Pictures
“[In] life, you rarely regret anything that you did, but you might regret things you didn’t do.”
—Jack Nicholson
GROWING UP in Neptune City, N.J., John Joseph Nicholson admitted, “I wasn’t inhibited by anything.” In fact, as he made his way in Hollywood from an office job at the HannaBarbera animation studio to garnering 12 Oscar nominations, it’s been his trademark — on-screen and off. Whether he’s handling roles, romances or rumors, Jack takes life in stride. Even at 37, when he found out the woman he thought was his sister was actually his mom, “it wasn’t what I’d call traumatizing.” Now, Jack, who turns 85 on April 22, handles aging with aplomb, as it’s brought “a lot of improvements” to his character as he retreated from the spotlight. “It’s all a balancing act; you just have to get used to the ride.”
7 1989 NO JOKE “It was fun to play a character who would never think of apologizing for any of his behavior,” explained Jack of Batman’s Joker. “I took the character more seriously than anyone else. As a child, Batman was my favorite character. To me back then, the cartoon was like Shakespeare blown up.”
8 1997 GOOD TAKE Including Helen Hunt in As Good as It Gets, every time he’s won an Oscar, his leading lady got one as well. Why? “I think my work habits are healthy. The better the people you work with are, the better you are, and that’s not just with women.”
1 1960 ROGER THAT “He was my lifeblood to whatever I thought I was going to be as a person,” confessed Jack about low-budget filmmaker Roger Corman, the only person “who’d hire me for 10 years” as Jack started out in cult pics such as Little Shop of Horrors. “I got to make them, and no one saw them [at the time], and I learned about acting.”
2 1969 EASY DOES IT Jack knew Easy Rider was “going to be huge.” But “I didn’t wake up saying, ‘Gee, my life is going to be different.’ I still don’t wake up that way. I don’t leap too easily to results .... I always expect something horrible next.”
3 1974 IN TOWN
“I’m a romantic,” said Jack about the appeal of playing Chinatown’s haunted P.I. Jake Gittes. “I allow myself to think that things could be better, could be more than they are.”
4 1976 OVER
EASY “My only hesitation about playing the part was that this guy was described as an enormous redhead,” said Jack of his Oscar turn as the manic Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “But as far as the interior of the character…. I knew I could play him to a T. I didn’t have a lot of reservations about anything in those days.”
5 “I will be something petrifying in between 10 and 100 million dreams,” confessed Jack with glee after playing the axe-wielding writer in Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic
The Shining (co-starring Shelley Duvall). “[And he’d] have been a lot worse if I’d had my way.”
6 1983 COMING TO
TERMS Even if it hadn’t won him his second Oscar, Terms of Endearment (with Shirley MacLaine) was a hit with Jack. “How many scripts make you cry?”
9 “My reaction to 9/11 was, ‘This is a catastrophe, so I’m just going to do comedy for a while,’” he’s said. “I’d won three in a row and thought, ‘Jeez, I really would like to play the bad guy [again]. And the guy [in The Departed], he’s bad .... He was obviously corrupt in every area, so I got to go as far out as I wanted.”
10 “I was never what you call a hands-on sort of father,” shared Jack of raising his five children, including his youngest, Ray. “But I’m lucky my kids have turned out the way they have. Parenthood is all about being in the lap of the gods. All you can do is your best.”