Jack Nicholson

The name Jack Nicholson has become synonymous with remarkable acting talent, maverick personality, and cinematic versatility. A consummate performer, Jack has made his reputation on a series of demanding roles--each uniquely eccentric--that explore man adrift in a hostile or indifferent world. Film Comment contributor Beverly Walker wrote that, time after time, Jack "has evoked empathy and identification with characters whose actions and attitudes are repellent or obstreperous....Many of [his] films have pushed at the outer edges of what mainstream society can tolerate. This...is part of his mystique."

Jack's appeal has never been based solely on his physical appearance, so he has avoided the stereotyping that traps so many of Hollywood's leading men. As he has aged, so too have his characters; where once he played agitated younger men, he now exalts in the special dilemmas of later life.

Jack told the New York Times Magazine: "I like to play people that haven't existed yet, a future something, a cusp character. I have that creative yearning. Much in the way Chagall flies figures into the air--once it becomes part of the conventional wisdom, it doesn't seem particularly adventurous or weird or wild." "Adventurous," "weird," and "wild" certainly describe many of Jack's memorable characters; but his approach to his craft is conventional, based on years of training and a predisposition to analysis and investigation. Rosenbaum characterized Jack as "one of those fanatic believers in the method and mystique of the craft of acting, an actor who, even during the dozen lean years in Hollywood when he was doing only B pictures, D pictures, biker epics and schlock, would nonetheless devotedly go from acting teacher to acting teacher seeking truth the way others of his generation would go from guru to guru or shrink to shrink....If Jack's film persona tends toward world-weary disillusion and cool cynicism, Jack himself is still the kind of excitable acting-theory enthusiast who is capable of great earnestness on the subject."

Natural as he may appear on the screen, Jack brings careful preparation to each part. His overall estimation of acting is also based on intellectual discoveries. "You know," he told Rosenbaum, "they say it takes 20 years at a minimum to make an actor, a full actor, and that's the stage I'm talking about. After you've got some kind of idea of how your instrument is, after you have developed some kind of idea thematically of what you think you're about, after you've got some kind of ease with the craft, then possibly you might have some style." Jack himself might serve as the perfect embodiment of his twenty-year plan: a long apprenticeship and much self-searching contributed to the effortless, stylish performances he is able to give today.