Jack Nicholson · 1980 · Signature Roles
Jack Torrance takes a job as winter caretaker of the isolated Overlook Hotel, hoping the solitude will help him write.
Jack Torrance takes a job as winter caretaker of the isolated Overlook Hotel, hoping the solitude will help him write. Stanley Kubrick’s film, adapted from Stephen King’s novel, turns that solitude into a slow possession, and Jack Nicholson’s performance turns a struggling writer into one of horror’s great monsters.
Nicholson plays the descent without a single clean break: the irritability that was already there, the drinking history, the resentment toward his wife and son, all curdling under the hotel’s influence. By the time he is chasing his family through a hedge maze with an axe, the famous grin is no longer charming. It is the face of a man who has stopped pretending to be sane.
The film was not an immediate critical success, but it has grown into a landmark, and Nicholson’s Torrance — “Here’s Johnny!” through a splintered door — is one of the most quoted and imitated performances in film history.