John Joseph Nicholson (born April 22, 1937) is an American actor and filmmaker whose career has spanned more than 60 years.
He is known for having played a wide range of starring and supporting roles, including comic characters, romantic leads, anti-heroes and villains. In many of his films, he played the eternal outsider, the sardonic drifter, someone who rebels against the social structure.
His most known and celebrated films include the road drama Easy Rider (1969); the dramas Five Easy Pieces (1970) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975); the comedy-dramas Carnal Knowledge (1971), The Last Detail (1973), Terms of Endearment (1983), Prizzi's Honor (1985), As Good as It Gets (1997), and About Schmidt (2002); the neo-noir mysteries Chinatown (1974) and The Pledge (2001); the horror film The Shining (1980); the biopic Reds (1981); the fantasy comedy The Witches of Eastwick (1987); the superhero film Batman (1989); the legal drama A Few Good Men (1992); the romantic horror film Wolf (1994); the science fiction comedy Mars Attacks! (1996); the comedy Anger Management (2003); the romantic comedy Something's Gotta Give (2003); and the crime drama The Departed (2006). He has also directed three films, including The Two Jakes (1990).
His twelve Academy Award nominations make him the most nominated male actor in the Academy's history.
He has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice, once for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and once for As Good as It Gets (1997). He also won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Terms of Endearment (1983). He is one of only three male actors to win three Academy Awards, and one of only two actors to be nominated for an Academy Award for acting in every decade from the 1960s to the 2000s. He has won six Golden Globe Awards and received the Kennedy Center Honor in 2001. In 1994, he became one of the youngest actors to be awarded the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award.
More information: Rolling Stone
Nicholson was born on April 22, 1937, in Neptune City, New Jersey, the son of a showgirl, June Frances Nicholson. Nicholson's mother was of Irish, English, German, and Welsh descent. She married Italian-American showman Donald Furcillo in 1936, before realizing that he was already married.
Nicholson first came to Hollywood in 1954, when he was seventeen, to visit his sister. He took a job as an office worker for animation directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera at the MGM cartoon studio.
He made his film debut in a low-budget teen drama The Cry Baby Killer (1958), playing the title role. For the following decade, Nicholson was a frequent collaborator with the film's producer, Roger Corman. Corman directed Nicholson on several occasions, such as in The Little Shop of Horrors, as masochistic dental patient and undertaker Wilbur Force, and also in The Raven; The Terror, where he plays a French officer seduced by an evil ghost; and The St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
One of Nicholson's greatest successes came in 1975, with his role as Randle P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The film was an adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel, and was directed by Miloš Forman and co-produced by Michael Douglas. Nicholson plays an anti-authoritarian patient at a mental hospital where he becomes an inspiring leader for the other patients. Playing one of the patients was Danny DeVito in an early role. Nicholson learned afterward that DeVito grew up in the same area of New Jersey, and they knew many of the same people. The film swept the Academy Awards with nine nominations, and won the top five, including Nicholson's first for Best Actor.
More information: The Guardian
Although he garnered no Academy Award for Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining (1980), it remains one of his more significant roles. He was Kubrick's first choice to play the lead role, although the book's author, Stephen King, wanted the part played by more of an everyman.
Nicholson won his second Oscar, an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, for his role of retired astronaut Garrett Breedlove in Terms of Endearment (1983), directed by James L. Brooks. It starred Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger.
Nicholson continued to work prolifically in the 1980s, starring in such films as: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981); Reds (1981), where Nicholson portrays the writer Eugene O'Neill with a quiet intensity; Prizzi's Honor (1985); Heartburn (1986); The Witches of Eastwick (1987); Broadcast News (1987); and Ironweed (1987). Three Oscar nominations also followed (Reds, Prizzi's Honor, and Ironweed). John Huston, who directed Prizzi's Honor, said of Nicholson's acting, He just illuminates the book. He impressed me in one scene after another; the film is composed largely of first takes with him.
In the 1989 Batman film, Nicholson played the psychotic villain, the Joker. The film was an international smash hit, and a lucrative deal earned him a percentage of the box office gross estimated at $60 million to $90 million. Nicholson said that he was particularly proud of his performance as the Joker: I considered it a piece of pop art, he said.
Nicholson went on to win his next Academy Award for Best Actor in the romantic comedy As Good as It Gets (1997), his third film directed by James L. Brooks. He played Melvin Udall, a wickedly funny, mean-spirited novelist with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Nicholson's acting career spans over sixty years. He has won three Academy Awards, and with twelve nominations, he is the most nominated male actor in the Academy's history.
More information: The Talks
I'm Irish. I think about death all the time.
Jack Nicholson
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