When the devil smiles at you, it’s already too late. But no one has tempted evil as skillfully as Jack Nicholson. And sometimes it takes the ultimate scoundrel to bump you on your way to freedom. Just like Jack did fifty years ago in perhaps his best movie.
Please allow us to introduce him to you. He is a man of wealth and taste. He has been around for many, many years. Stole the soul and faith of many a man. Fans of the Rolling Stones with an English course on Duolingo will hopefully be enlightened by this introduction. To all others, we can reveal: We have sympathy for the Jack. Because as the man himself once said in an interview with Playboy: “People have a certain affection for the guy who played the devil.” Once in the truest sense (“The Witches of Eastwick”, 1987), but mostly in the form of sophisticated manipulators and villains (from “Carnal Knowledge”, 1971 to “The Departed”, 2006). But the greatest trick Nicholson has mastered as Zelluloid’s smoothest Belzebub was once revealed by writer Henry Miller in his essay “On Seeing Jack Nicholson for the First Time”: “He is forgiven for all his misdeeds. And that is his greatest misdeed.”
This is apparently just as true on screen as it is in his private life. Nicholson’s longest love affair with fellow actress Anjelica Huston ended in 1990 after 17 turbulent years when his lover Rebecca Broussard became pregnant. However, Jack and Anjelica still have a close friendship to this day – most recently, the actor offered his ex-partner shelter when she had to flee the forest fires in Los Angeles in 2024. Jack now has six children. Maybe. He never officially recognized at least one daughter. For the other five offspring, Lothario sometimes even got up at half past six in the morning, something he wouldn’t normally do for a million dollars. Jack never got to know his own father. He learned from a journalist that the woman Nicholson thought was his sister all his life was actually his mother. She was so young when he was born in 1937 that his grandmother pretended to be his mother and raised him. When Jack found out the truth, he was 37 years old and had just finished filming “Chinatown”. Both women had already died by then. Jack digested the shock quickly and pragmatically – and moved on to the next script.
Monsters among lunatics
“The less people know about me, the easier my job is,” the actor once revealed. But even in the midst of such dramatic revelations from his family history, Nicholson delivered some of the most outstanding jobs of his career. He collected collaborations with the world’s greatest directors in the seventies and eighties like Pokémon cards: Michelangelo Antonioni, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski, Ken Russell and Elia Kazan all made demands on this exceptional talent. But it was Jack’s tour de force in front of Miloš Forman’s camera that earned him the first of his three Oscars in 1976. The leading role in the film adaptation of the novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” culminates Jack’s ability to be both a charlatan and a charmer.
The protagonist of the story is Randle McMurphy, a criminal convicted of violent offenses and sex with minors. In order to escape forced labor in prison, he feigns a mental disorder in the hope of a comfortable time in a psychiatric ward. He is forgiven for all his misdeeds, as the loudmouth quickly becomes the liberator of the inmates, who suffer under the strict regime of a resolute head nurse. In a dictatorship of sedated conformity, Randle’s hedonistic chaos is a heroic act. He performs it with a greatest-hits program of Jack Nicholsonisms: eyebrows that go up and down as steeply as the price of Bitcoin. A grin that widens as menacingly as a grizzly spreading its paws. Foaming outbursts of rage that would send the grizzly fleeing with its tail between its legs. But at the end: eerie silence. We are so bold as to spoil a 50-year-old movie: Randle must make the ultimate sacrifice so that his rebelliousness triumphs against the inhumanity of boredom. In the end, Nicholson has done it again: we’ve lost our hearts to a scumbag. You’ve been hijacked.
No more cunning
Jack Nicholson celebrated his 88th birthday in April. Birthday. Maybe. Whether he actually blew out the cake candles wearing a party hat is difficult to verify. The screen icon now lives in seclusion in a hard-to-reach corner of the Hollywood Hills. Recently, there was a rare public appearance when Jack announced his friend Adam Sandler at an anniversary show of the comedy program “Saturday Night Live”. Wearing sunglasses and a New York Yankees béret, Jack gave the impression that he had at least one last big movie appearance left in him. But the way America has disappointed us in recent months, it would probably be a guest role as Lord Glipglop in another Marvel entry. So let’s give Jack Nicholson his retirement. Nevertheless, we have to realize: The world doesn’t seem to be doing any better since the devil retired. Quite the opposite.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Jack Nicholson went crazy in 1975. In “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, he plays a criminal who swindles his way into a psychiatric ward to escape a harsher sentence. But he soon finds himself confronted with far greater problems. The film raised questions about the institutionalized treatment of mentally ill people – and still does today. The drama won five awards in the main categories at the Academy Awards, including for Jack Nicholson as Best Actor in a Leading Role. The film can currently be streamed on Apple TV and Amazon Video.
Voted the classic par excellence by us and many other film nerds: You can watch the trailer for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” here.
Photos: © dpa Picture Alliance
Almost the same age, just as iconic, yet completely different: read our portrait of Bob Dylan here.
