Jack Nicholson Biography
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John Joseph Nicholson (born April 22, 1937)
is a highly successful, iconic American method actor. He is best known
for portraying antagonistic, cynical, neurotic and aggressive
characters. He received Kennedy Center Honors in 2001, and has been
nominated for an Academy Award a dozen times, winning three of them. He
has also won seven Golden Globe Awards.
He was born in New York, New York, although
until 1974 he had thought his place of birth was his hometown, Neptune
Township, New Jersey. A journalist's research uncovered what apparently
had happened: the woman he had always thought of as his mother was
actually his grandmother, who had arranged to raise him as her own
child. She did this because he was actually the illegitimate offspring
of her daughter, a woman whom Nicholson thought was his older sister.
Because of this fact Nicholson is pro-life and has spoken out about it
saying, "I'm very contra my constituency in terms of abortion because
I'm positively against it. I don't have the right to any other view. My
only emotion is gratitude, literally, for my life."
Nicholson started his career as an actor,
writer, and producer, working for and with Roger Corman. This included
his screen debut in The Cry Baby Killer (1958), where he played a
juvenile delinquent who panics after shooting two other teenagers, and
Little Shop of Horrors, in which he had a small role as a masochistic
dental patient.
His work with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper
on the LSD-fueled The Trip led to his real break. That film led to a
small supporting role in Easy Rider (1969), for which he received his
first Oscar nomination. A Best Actor nomination came the following year
for his persona-defining role in Five Easy Pieces (1970), which includes
his famous chicken salad dialogue about getting what you want.
Other early movies he is known for include
Hal Ashby's The Last Detail (1973), Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974),
Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), for which he
received his first Oscar, and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Nicholson
won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Terms of
Endearment (1983).
The 1989 Batman, where Nicholson played the
supervillain The Joker, was an international smash hit, and a lucrative
percentage deal earned Nicholson about $50 million.
For his role as hotheaded Col. Nathan R.
Jessup in A Few Good Men (1992), a dark movie about a murder in a US
Marine Corps unit, he received yet another nomination by the Academy.
This film contains Nicholson's "You can't handle the truth!" scene,
which has since become widely known and imitated.
Not all of Nicholson's performances are
praised; his take on the U.S. President in Mars Attacks (1996) was
widely criticized for being over-the-top and unfunny. Nicholson would go
on to win his next Oscar for his role as the neurotic lead in the
romance As Good As It Gets (1997).
The September 11, 2001 attacks led
Nicholson to focus on comedies. In About Schmidt (2002), Nicholson
portrayed a rural Nebraska man who questions his own life after his
retirement and the death of his wife shortly afterward. The deeply
emotional, slow film stands in sharp contrast to many of his previous
roles. In the comedy Anger Management, he plays an aggressive therapist
alongside Adam Sandler. His most recent film is the 2003 Something's
Gotta Give.
Nicholson is also a well-known and highly
visible fan of the NBA's Los Angeles Lakers; he has courtside seats, and
attends whenever his schedule allows. When he is at a televised Lakers
game, he is invariably sought out for celebrity camera shots during one
or more breaks in the game.
Nicholson is said to have called Fidel
Castro a "genius" while visiting Cuba, according to former Cuban
intelligence officer Delfin Fernandez, who also revealed that during his
visit his room was bugged with both video and audio recording devices.
* * * *
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URL of Original Article:
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Date Article Copied:
July 12, 2004
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