Jack Nicholson Biography

Nicholson's mother, June, was a highly talented dancer and showgirl who, by the age of 17, was already making a name with the renowned Earl Carroll Dancers (her stage-name was June Nilson). At 17, she met the handsome, Neapolitan-extracted Don Furcillo-Rose, a charismatic showman who'd later own thoroughbreds and run a chain of beauty parlours. The couple fell deeply in love but disaster quickly struck them when June fell pregnant. Rose was not yet divorced from his first wife, so he could not marry her, thereby saving her from the shame and humiliation inevitable at that time. In desperation, they paid officials to turn a blind eye and married anyway, June using her stage name. It was no good. June's mother Ethel May freaked out, but organised matters. June was sent to her cousin's in New York where she would carry and bear the child. Then she would return and Ethel would rear the child as her own. No one would know. As for Rose, well, the plan was he would never see his lover again. He would occasionally provide money, but mostly just wait to see if the police would bust him for bigamy. And maybe worse, given that June was officially a minor.

So Jack grew up surrounded by women. There was his mother (grandmother) Ethel, who ran a beauty parlour in the basement. There was his sister (mother), June, and his other sister (aunt) Lorraine. And, for a few years at least, there was the man whose name he was given, Ethel's Irish husband John Joseph Nicholson. He was by all accounts a kind man, a window dresser and sign-writer by trade. He'd take young Jack to the cinema, but also to bars, because John Snr drank heavily. Indeed, he'd be dead from it by 1955.

Young Jack was a happy and very good-looking child. He attended Manasquan High School, in New Jersey, but did not take to his studies. He did, though, star in many school plays and, when 17 and on a trip to California to visit his sister (he does have a real sister - well, a half sister - named Pamela Hawley Liddicoat. There's also Don's daughter Donna Rose), he decided to get into the movies. He worked as a messenger boy for the cartoon unit at MGM, and trained as an actor with a group called the Players Ring Theatre. He found jobs onstage and on TV - in shows such as Bronco, Hawaiian Eye and Tales Of Wells Fargo (in the mid-Sixties he'd also appear as Jaime Angel in Dr Kildare). Then came his first breakthrough when, in 1958, director Roger Corman cast him as the lead in his low-budget The Cry-Baby Killer. Corman, best-known for his camp adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe would soon also cast him as a pain-loving dental patient in Little Shop Of Horrors and, alongside Peter Lorre, in The Raven. Being as Corman would often shoot films back-to-back using the same sets, Nicholson hung around after The Raven, and so got to star with Boris Karloff in The Terror.

Now married to actress Sandra Knight (they'd have a daughter, Jennifer - now Jennifer Norfleet - in 1965, then divorce a year later), with Harry Dean Stanton as his best man, Nicholson took to writing, seeing his Thunder Island filmed in 1963. Then came a relationship with director Monte Hellman, with whom Nicholson made four movies in quick succession, writing both Flight To Fury and Ride In The Whirlwind and co-producing the latter, as well as The Shooting. These last two movies were odd pieces, existential Westerns with winding, thoughtful scripts. Having read widely and consumed an awful lot of drugs, Nicholson was profoundly interested in internal consciousness and the counter-culture, and attempted to squeeze his thinking into the hoary old Western format.

Not for long. Next he went all-out into the mind-expansion business, writing Corman's LSD extravaganza The Trip, putting together The Monkees' weird-out Head and starring in such contemporary rebel flicks as Hells Angels On Wheels. Then it all happened for him. In The Trip, a TV director decides to score some acid and explore his mind. Playing the director was Peter Fonda, the dealer being Dennis Hopper. Now these two had their own project, Easy Rider and, with Rip Torn pulling out at the last, they asked Nicholson to step in as the spirit-soaked Southern lawyer. The movie made him a star, got him Oscar-nominated and launched him on an incredible run of success.

Nicholson was Oscar-nominated again as the disaffected musical prodigy in Five Easy Pieces. Once again as the hard-nosed officer showing young Randy Quaid a good time on his way to jail in The Last Detail. And once AGAIN as streetwise private dick JJ Gittes, taken for a ride by Faye Dunaway in Roman Polanski's Chinatown. Perhaps just as importantly, he also won quite a reputation as a womaniser for his salacious role in the controversial Carnal Knowledge. It was a rep he'd more than live up to.

It was while making his next movie, The Fortune, a fairly zany effort with fellow-stud Warren Beatty, that Nicholson heard the truth about his family. Unfortunately, his real mother had died of cancer back in 1963, and his grandmother had passed away in 1970, some four months before Easy Rider sent her beloved child into the stratosphere. The truth hit him hard. He did call his father, reportedly beginning the conversation with a terse "Hello. I understand you're family", but he did not allow the relationship to blossom. Instead, he went his own way - very much his own way.

First there was the long-awaited Oscar. As Randall McMurphy, the free spirit battling the system in a mental institution in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, he was superb, deservedly taking Best Actor. But, ever the rebel, he would not use his status simply to score the big roles. Indeed, over his career, Nicholson has missed out on some peaches: Michael Corleone in The Godfather, the Robert Redford roles in The Sting and The Great Gatsby, Martin Sheen's in Apocalypse Now,Jon Voight's in Coming Home. First he tested himself against Marlon Brando in the offbeat The Missouri Breaks, then he directed his own Goin' South, featuring Mary Steenburgen in her first major role (he'd actually made his directorial debut back in 1970, with Drive, He Said).

Goin' South was good fun but it didn't do well. Nicholson took time off before reappearing in one of his most famous roles -as Jack Torrance in The Shining ("Heeere's JOHNNY!"). Compelling and utterly overblown, he'd use many of the character traits again in as The Joker in Batman and the devil in The Witches Of Eastwick. He courted controversy once more in Warren Beatty's Commie-friendly Reds (for which he was once more Oscar-nominated) and with his rough'n' racy sex scenes with Jessica Lange in a remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

He won another Oscar as a flirty ex-astronaut Garrett Breedlove, attempting to seduce Shirley Maclaine in Terms Of Endearment, a role he'd later reprise in The Evening Star. Then was nominated some more as the hitman in Prizzi's Honour, alongside Angelica Huston, and the sympathetic loser in Ironweed. He'd be nominated yet again as the explosive Colonel Nathan R. Jessup in A Few Good Men ("You can't HANDLE the truth!"), and win once more as the crotchety obsessive-compulsive Melvin Udall in As Good As It Gets. In the meantime there was money. Nicholson's movies have taken over $1.25 billion at the box-office, but the figure that's most often quoted is the $60 million he received from his share of 1989's Batman. He must have known something big was on the cards when, in his Cuckoo's Nest Oscar acceptance speech, he thanked Mary Pickford "for being the first actor to get a percentage of her pictures".

Of course, there's also the sex. Despite his 17-year relationship with Anjelica Huston, Nicholson was alleged to have had many, many affairs. She finally left him when he began seeing his daughter's best friend, Rebecca Broussard, with whom he had two children - Lorraine and Raymond (he'd had a son, Caleb Goddard, with actress Susan Anspach, back in 1970). Next came another actress, Lara Flynn Boyle, over 30 years his junior, who he dated secretly until they were involved in a car accident and she fled before the ambulance arrived, the story subsequently being released to the public. There was furthermore the rather nasty case of Christine Sheehan, an ex-prostitute who claimed she went to Nicholson's Hollywood home in 1996 and, when she demanded money for her services, had her head banged repeatedly on the floor. She settled out-of-court for $33,000 but later, claiming her injuries had worsened, went after another half a million. Nicholson contested her claims vehemently.

Now in his Sixties, Nicholson seemed to alternate between loud, larger-than-life characters, like his duel role of president and extravagant Vegas entrepreneur in Tim Burton's hilarious Mars Attacks!, and ordinary Joes having trouble with onrushing age, like his dodgy wine merchant, botching his one-last-job in 1996's Blood And Wine. Following these two would come the critically lauded The Pledge, where he played a retired cop obsessed with a child-murder case. The film reunited him with director Sean Penn, with whom he also made The Crossing Guard in 1994. And it just kept coming. In About Schmidt, he was Oscar-nominated for the 12th time as the titular anti-hero, a retired 66-year-old whose wife dies, leading him to go rescue his daughter, about to marry her buffoonish fraud of a boyfriend. Though cantankerous and disapproving, Nicholson's Schmidt was quiet and understated, a man searching for a life and a far cry from Melvin Udall. His scene in the hot tub with a lascivious Kathy Bates were lent yet more hilarity by Nicholson's fearsome sexual reputation.

There'd be more comedy when Nicholson joined Adam Sandler in Anger Management. Here Sandler would play a businessman unjustly placed in an anger management programme and mentored by Nicholson, a guru who's seemingly more psychotic than psychotherapist, railing at Sandler, humiliating him and even angling for his girlfriend, Marisa Tomei. It was another brilliant performance, elevating the movie far above Sandler's usual meek-guy-goes-mental schtick.

2003 would be a good year for Nicholson, always keen to stay on top of the Hollywood tree. Not only was The Trip finally classified by the British censors, and a big hit enjoyed with the then-hot Sandler, he also released Something's Gotta Give, a far milder comedy but another $100 million hit. Here he'd reunite with Diane Keaton for the first time since Reds in 1981, Keaton playing a successful and single author whose highly organised life is turned upside down when she discovers her 30-year-old daughter, Amanda Peet, is dating notorious 63-year-old Lothario Nicholson. And matters are complicated further when Nicholson suffers a heart attack at her Hamptons home and must be looked after. Eventually it was a sweet love story, with Nicholson gradually recognising the older woman's charms, and he did lend depth to his quickly maturing philanderer, winning a 15th Golden Globe nomination for his efforts, but the movie was undermined by a smugness that kept it from being believable.

Approaching his seventies, Nicholson was now immensely cautious when choosing his roles. Having finally ended his tempestuous relationship with Lara Flynn Boyle, an actress over 30 years his junior, he would only emerge to work when fully satisfied that he would shine in a role. And he needed to be properly remunerated. Nicholson would never accept "interesting" parts for low wages, even taking $10 million for his friend Sean Penn's The Pledge. He preferred to wait for the studios to bring him the goods. Thus there was a three year break between Something's Gotta Give and his next picture, The Departed.

It was a mark of Nicholson's advanced choosiness that he nearly refused even this chance to work with Martin Scorsese for the first time, as well as a prime cast including Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg. Having been allowed full licence to expand his part, though, he delivered yet another explosive portrayal when playing Frank Costello, a New York gang boss. The film would centre around two undercover informers, cop DiCaprio having infiltrated Nicholson's mob and Damon having been sent by Nicholson to infiltrate the police. But most of the talk surrounding the movie would involve Nicholson's Costello, a man so controlling, so depraved, so comfortable with violence he was instantly hailed as one of cinema's great monsters. One year from his seventieth birthday, Nicholson's deep well of anger and creativity was still far from dry.

Nicholson was showing no signs of quitting the scene. He even managed to shock the tabloids once again when in 2006 it was revealed that he'd had a lovechild with Danish supermodel Winnie Hollman, the now 24-tear-old Honey noting that she'd always been accepted and treated well by her father. That's another thing about Nicholson. We think we know all about him. Surely we must know everything about such a public figure. But he has deliberately hidden himself behind that powerful public persona, a persona that has us believing him to be endlessly fun-loving, skirt-chasing and really rather superficial, and thus he's still able to surprise us with the depth of his work.

Lara Flynn Boyle once claimed that dating Nicholson was like being with a King and - talented, experienced, charismatic, fabulously well connected, Oscar-nominated in five successive decades and unbelievably rich - in modern terms that's pretty much what he is.

Dominic Wills