April 11, 2007. Copyright 2007, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Joker Jack back on top form
By Joanna Griffin

LONDON, April 11, Graphic News:  Actor Jack Nicholson was never going to age gracefully. On the eve of his 70th birthday on April 22, the charismatic Hollywood legend with the crooked leer and manic eyes still retains the power to shock film fans out of their comfort zone.

NicholsonÕs latest movie appearance, in Martin ScorseseÕs Oscar-winning The Departed, delighted critics who have grumbled about his tendency to self-parody in recent years. NicholsonÕs heavy-lidded turn as tough Boston gangster Billy Costello has been rated one of the finest in a career littered with memorable, menacing villains.

Nicholson, who has won three Oscars and been nominated for more than any other male actor, has a reputation for playing dark, unstable characters, but as with Billy Costello, it is often their cruel wit that lifts them into another realm.

Nicholson was born in Neptune City, New Jersey, in 1937, to June Frances Nicholson, a showgirl of Irish/English descent whose mother decided to bring up the baby so that June could pursue her career. It would be many years before Nicholson discovered that the woman he had believed to be his sister was in fact his mother.

In the early days Nicholson worked both in front of and behind the camera. He played a neurotic dental patient in The Little Shop of Horrors in 1960 and directed The Terror (1963), where he met his now ex-wife Sandra Knight. His breakthrough role came in the cult classic Easy Rider, in which he played a hard-drinking lawyer who befriends two stoned buddies on a road trip. Nicholson rates that performance as one of his best and it earned him a first Academy Award nomination.

After Easy Rider, the roles came thick and fast, and Nicholson kept on delivering. Memorable movies include Five Easy Pieces (1970), Chinatown (1974), and One Flew Over the CuckooÕs Nest (1975), in which his performance as a crazed rebel in an asylum won him his first Oscar. In The Shining (1980) Nicholson played a tormented writer who finally turns murderous.

If Nicholson has a particular talent, itÕs for black comedy. This is evident in all his films, but nowhere more overtly than in Batman (1989). NicholsonÕs Joker was a key factor in the filmÕs commercial success, and netted the actor some $60 million. Later he complained that fans had begun to typecast him as the cartoonish prankster.

However, he did not help his cause with a string of over the top performances that lapsed into self-parody. These include his role as an aggressive therapist in the comedy Anger Management. Critics remarked that it was as if he had become bored with the movie business, but in 2003 he surprised many with his performance as an ageing lothario who falls for his young girlfriendÕs mother in SomethingÕs Gotta Give.

In real life, too, Nicholson has a reputation as a ladyÕs man and confirmed bachelor after a string of relationships with high-profile women, including actress Anjelica Huston. The fanatical Los Angeles Lakers fan has five children, including a daughter from his marriage to Knight, and a daughter and son from his relationship with Rebecca Broussard.
/ENDS