Jack Nicholson
Jack Nicholson’s smile is one of the most famous in film, and one of the least trustworthy.
Jack Nicholson’s smile is one of the most famous in film, and one of the least trustworthy. It can mean charm, menace, madness, or all three at once, and Nicholson spent the 1970s teaching audiences never to be sure which. He was the decade’s great wild card: the actor who could steal a film in ten minutes and then carry one for two hours, often playing men who refused to be tamed by institutions, marriages, or their own better judgment.
John Joseph Nicholson was born on April 22, 1937, in Neptune City, New Jersey. His family story was famously tangled: he grew up believing his grandmother was his mother and his mother was his sister, learning the truth only as an adult in 1974, when a magazine profile revealed it. He has said the discovery did not devastate him — he had always sensed something unspoken — and the experience seems to have fed his lifelong comfort with characters who keep secrets, even from themselves.
He came to Hollywood in the late 1950s, acting in low-budget films for Roger Corman and writing screenplays, including The Trip (1967). His breakthrough arrived with Easy Rider (1969), in which he played George Hanson, a drunken lawyer who joins two bikers on the road and delivers a campfire speech about freedom that became the film’s conscience. The performance earned him his first Academy Award nomination and made him, at thirty-two, a star of the new Hollywood.
The 1970s that followed were extraordinary. In Five Easy Pieces (1970) he played Bobby Dupea, a concert pianist who abandoned classical music to work on oil rigs, a man of real talent and real self-sabotage; the film’s famous diner scene, in which Bobby argues with a waitress about toast, became a symbol of a generation’s refusal to accept the menu it was handed. In Carnal Knowledge (1971) he played Jonathan, a man whose charm curdles into cruelty over decades. In The Last Detail (1973) he played Billy “Badass” Buddusky, a Navy man escorting a young prisoner to jail and deciding, against every rule, to show the kid one good time first.
Then came Chinatown (1974), in which he played Jake Gittes, a private detective in 1930s Los Angeles who uncovers a conspiracy over water, power, and incest, and learns that some truths do not set anyone free. Directed by Roman Polanski from Robert Towne’s screenplay, Chinatown is often called the greatest screenplay ever written, and Nicholson’s Gittes — wisecracking, decent, outmatched — is its wounded heart.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) gave him Randle Patrick McMurphy, the convict who fakes insanity to escape prison labor and lands in a mental ward run by the icy Nurse Ratched. Nicholson plays McMurphy as pure life force — funny, sexual, rebellious — and the film’s tragedy is watching that force get systematically broken. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture and earned Nicholson the Academy Award for Best Actor, his first win.
He closed the decade, and the 1970s section of his career, with The Shining (1980), Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, in which he played Jack Torrance, a writer whose isolation in an empty hotel tips into murderous madness. The performance — the grin through a splintered door, the “Here’s Johnny!” that was partly improvised — became one of horror’s defining images, and it showed that Nicholson’s smile could now carry a whole film’s terror.
Later decades brought more Oscars and more range: Terms of Endearment (1983), for which he won Best Supporting Actor; Batman (1989), as the Joker; A Few Good Men (1992), with its courtroom explosion; As Good as It Gets (1997), for which he won a third Oscar as a misanthropic writer learning, painfully, to be kind. He has six children, has never married, and largely retired from acting after 2010, his later years marked by public affection and a deliberate withdrawal from the spotlight.
Nicholson’s legacy is a particular kind of American movie star: intelligent, dangerous, funny, and impossible to pin down. He played rebels who were also bullies, heroes who were also fools, and madmen who were also, somehow, the sanest person in the room. The smile never told you which. That was the point.
Before stardom, Nicholson spent a decade in the low-budget world of Roger Corman, acting in films like The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) and writing screenplays including The Trip (1967) and Head (1968), the Monkees’ surreal film. Those years taught him economy: how to make an impression in a few minutes, how to write a scene that actors could play. When Easy Rider arrived, he was ready in a way that younger, prettier actors were not — he knew exactly what a small role needed, because he had spent years playing them.
His longevity is unmatched in one specific measure: with twelve Academy Award nominations, he is the most Oscar-nominated male actor in history, with wins spread across three decades and across leading and supporting categories. The later performances — the retired executive of About Schmidt (2002), the mob boss of The Departed (2006), the terminal patient of The Bucket List (2007) — showed the smile aging into something more reflective, but never less dangerous. Even in smaller late roles, audiences watched for the moment the grin would change meaning, and Nicholson rarely disappointed them.
Nicholson also directed, most notably The Two Jakes (1990), his own sequel to Chinatown, in which he returned as Jake Gittes older, wearier, and still chasing a truth that would not stay buried. And his turn as the Joker in Batman (1989) — the grin weaponized, the menace played as showmanship — helped prove that comic-book films could carry a genuine star performance, and it introduced his smile to a generation that had never seen Cuckoo’s Nest.