Jack Nicholson is Hollywood royalty. "It's half the entire history of cinema," he laughs when reminded he is 50 years in the business. His latest character has many unfulfilled ambitions, but can he himself have any, asks Michael Dwyer.
Not many actors are so established that the mere mention of their first name commands attention, as when an Academy Awards show compere announces: "Here's Jack." Okay, it's different if your name is Keanu or Meryl or Uma, because you're unlikely to be confused with anybody else. There are a lot of Jacks in show business, but there's only one Jack Nicholson.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the release of his first film, Cry Baby Killer. Now 70, he has received 12 Oscar nominations and won three times. He has no need to throw himself around the interview circuit in the manner of a publicity-starved starlet. When he comes to London to promote his new movie, The Bucket List, most of his interviews are with round-table groups of international journalists.
Nicholson emerges with a boisterous laugh from one of those sessions as we settle down for a one-to-one conversation in his suite at Claridge's. He's in exuberant form, projecting the extrovert personality that is his trademark, and it fills the room. Star quality is an elusive feature, but Nicholson exudes it in spades. His nature is gregarious. He couldn't care less about spouting the PR-manufactured quotes trotted out by actors half his age. And he is in such spirited freewheeling form, digressing on to one tangent and then another, that most of my carefully prepared questions don't get asked, even though some eventually get in sideways as Nicholson engagingly holds forth.
All he has to hear is that I've travelled from Dublin and he's off. "Up the Irish!" he exclaims. "I love the Irish. I've been quite a few times. You know Ireland is the only place where I drink. I don't drink, but when I get to Ireland I run off that plane to the nearest bar to get some Guinness draught."
Like so many Hollywood actors, Nicholson claims Irish ancestry. He has traced his roots, or at least tried to do so. "I come from the Lynches of Sligo," he declares. "You know, I went there, but I looked in the phone book and there are nine million Lynches in Sligo." Two years ago, in The Departed, Nicholson played a Boston gangster named Frank Costello, who was very different from the Irishmen played by John Wayne and Bing Crosby.
"Almost all gangster performances come from one apocryphal story," he says. "About 70 years ago Elia Kazan was acting at the Group Theatre [ in New York], and he was playing a gangster. He invited someone he knew who was in that business to see it. He asked the gangster afterwards what he thought." Nicholson drops his voice to a hoarse whisper. "He told Kazan: 'You don't have to talk too loud. They know who you are.' So that's how most gangsters have been played ever since, but I didn't want to do it that way. I wanted to do a different kind of gangster, as an Irish guy who enjoys his job."
I remark that Nicholson evidently enjoys his own job. "I do," he says, smiling broadly. "I like that time on the set when you're actually acting. That's the fun of the job. Everyone will tell you that the waiting around is the tough part. The great thing about directing a movie is that there's never any waiting, because you're always busy. And there's no pressure. If you know how to direct, then it's an easy job. If you know how to act, there's still pressure. Plus you're in charge when you're directing. Your job is to draw the best from the people."
In The Bucket List Nicholson and Morgan Freeman play Edward and Carter, terminally ill cancer patients sharing a hospital room. Edward is a self-made billionaire who owns the hospital; Carter is a mechanic. Deciding that life's too short, and getting very short for both of them, they agree to escape into the outside world and to realise the unfulfilled ambitions of their lives.
The movie takes its title from Carter's agenda of things he would love to do before he kicks the bucket, as he puts it, and these two men, who have nothing to lose, engage in skydiving, racing vintage cars and travelling the world to see the Taj Mahal, Everest and the Great Pyramid of Khufu.
Freeman suggested Nicholson as his co-star, and said that acting with him would be on his own bucket list. "We've known each other for a long time," Nicholson drawls. "We have a lot in common. Morgan is a man of mystery, a very diverse and complicated person. He is a jet pilot. He owns a blues club. He sails by himself. He's a truly accomplished human being, and he is cool. You don't hear too much about all those aspects of him. I've known him since the 1970s. We were not distinguished actors when we first met. We were wild men. That was our original attraction. We've watched one another over the years, and from the beginning I've always loved Morgan's work."
There is an evident chemistry between the two actors on screen, and some of the dialogue sounds ad libbed, as when Nicholson asks Freeman if he always had those distinctive freckles on his face. "When I'm somewhat involved in the writing, a lot of the improvisation occurs there," Nicholson says. "This was something I could well have improvised. It was the same in that scene where I say that I gave up a lunch date with Michelle Pfeiffer to come to the meeting. You use the things from your life."
Just like Edward in the movie, Nicholson got down to work at a young age, seeking out roles and gradually building his reputation to get to the top of the pile. "I won't say I was comfortable doing what I was doing for the first 10 or 11 years," he says, "but, looking back on it, I'm glad I was a late success. Number one, you're no good at the beginning, and I had to learn some things about, specifically, me. I did those movies produced by Roger Corman whether they were good or not. Yes, some of them were good, but that had very little to do with the criteria in those days. They were made for a price, often extremely low budgets, so in that framework you do a lot of really horrible work.
"As I think back on it, the fact that I knew what was horrible work was an asset. Everyone always thought I was good, from the very beginning, but nothing happened, because I wasn't what they regarded as a success. Because of that, Roger was the only guy that hired me back then, and I'm eternally grateful to him for that. A lot of what I know about film-making I learned from his bare-necessity approach."
Unlike Edward in The Bucket List Nicholson has enjoyed spending his millions, leading the lifestyle of a good-time guy on the Hollywood party circuit. In 1962 he married Sandra Knight, with whom he worked on a Corman feature, and they had a daughter before they divorced, in 1968. Nicholson has had four other children with three different women, one of them his Five Easy Pieces co-star Susan Anspach.
He was with Anjelica Huston, who introduced him to Ireland, from 1973 to 1989, and more recently with another fellow actor, Lara Flynn Boyle, until they broke up, in 2001. In a recent interview with Men's Journal Nicholson said that he could not commit to any woman for very long and that it was a big mistake for anyone to think he could stay married.
Coincidentally, every time Nicholson has won an Oscar his leading lady has collected one, too: Louise Fletcher for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Shirley MacLaine for Terms of Endearment and Helen Hunt for As Good As It Gets. Have women been queuing up to work with him?
"I think my work habits are healthy," he says. "The better the people you work with are, the better you are, and that's not just with women. I'm particularly proud of what you just mentioned. I find that having healthy working habits makes people want to work with you. When I decide to do a movie I give myself to it, and I never think of what might be coming next. I don't even read a script unless a friend wrote it. I'm never thinking about the next job."
Nicholson's life has taken him on a long journey, from B-movies to being Hollywood royalty, one of those special people called on to present the best-picture award at the Oscars. "That's the only time I appear on TV, as a presenter at the Oscars," he says with a laugh. "I don't do TV interviews, because I think it makes my job harder."
When I note that it has been 50 years since his first movie was released, he chortles. "I hadn't realised that," he says. "Well, the way I look at it is that it's half the entire history of cinema. When you think about it that way, it's quite an experience. I was at a crossroads back in the late 1960s. I already had a job to direct a picture when Easy Rider came out of the blue. I had planned to direct far more movies than I have directed, but Easy Rider changed so much for me as an actor."
Referring to the two men in The Bucket List, he says: "It's always the things you don't do in life that you regret most, not the things you do." Does he have any unfulfilled ambitions of his own? "Well, you know," he says, pausing to reflect on this, "I'd like to invent something, like the paper clip or something like that. I was thinking just this morning about the difference between certain things in America and in Europe. Every place you go the light switches are different, the sockets are different and even the doorknobs are different. In America, once you get the doorknob figured out, they don't keep on trying to do it differently."
The Bucket List goes on general release next Friday.
OSCAR KNIGHT
Jack Nicholson has won three Academy Awards and been nominated for nine more. These 12 films are marked in red.
1958 The Cry Baby Killer What used to be known as juvenile delinquents were recurring characters in 1950s films; Nicholson makes his cinema debut as one in this Roger Corman B-movie.
1968 Pursuing his ambitions as screenwriter and producer, Nicholson stays off screen for this endearingly surreal and zany comedy-musical based around The Monkees.
1969 Easy Rider Nicholson gets his big break (and first Oscar nomination), as a boozy young lawyer who takes to the road with bikers (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) who were "looking for America and couldn't find it anywhere" in the definitive picture of the counterculture era.
Five Easy Pieces In one of his finest, most complex performances, Nicholson plays a volatile, disillusioned man rejecting his wealthy background in Bob Rafelson's melancholy, acutely observed drama.
Carnal Knowledge It's all about sex, and it was charged with obscenity in a US court and banned in Ireland. The first of Nicholson's four movies directed by Mike Nichols, it candidly charts the sexual experiences of two men (Nicholson and singer turned actor Art Garfunkel) over 20 eventful years.
Drive, He Said Staying behind the camera, Nicholson turns director with a cynical picture featuring William Tepper as a basketball star. It is as uneven as it is underestimated.
The Last Detail As one of two sailors escorting a young thief to prison, Nicholson is on bravura form in Hal Ashby's wise, witty and revealing movie.
Chinatown Ingeniously scripted by Robert Towne, Roman Polanski's US masterpiece features Nicholson on superlative form as private eye Jake Gittes, unravelling a web of corruption in 1930s Los Angeles.
In a diverting cameo, Nicholson plays the specialist examining the deaf, dumb and blind pinball wizard in Ken Russell's deliriously staged musical, based on the rock opera by The Who.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Superstardom looms as Nicholson collects his first best-actor Oscar as exuberant asylum inmate Randle P McMurphy, heading a bravura cast that adds weight to Milos Forman's simplistic treatment of Ken Kesey's novel.
The Missouri Breaks Nicholson plays a horse thief with a mannered, Irish-accented Marlon Brando as his pursuer in Arthur Penn's handsome, laconic Western.
The Shining "Here's Johnny!" Nicholson declares with a maniacal grin in Stanley Kubrick's stylishly overcooked Stephen King adaptation.
The Postman Always Rings Twice This version of James M Cain's much-filmed novel was charged with such sexual tension in the kitchen-table coupling of Nicholson and Jessica Lange that it prompted many viewers to ask if they really did it. (Of course not: they're actors.)
1981 Reds Nicholson gives one of his great performances, as the alcoholic playwright Eugene O'Neill in an ambitious socialist epic starring, produced, directed and co-written by his pal Warren Beatty.
Terms of Endearment Playing a boozy astronaut, Nicholson collects his second Oscar, this time as best supporting actor, in a manipulatively sentimental melodrama.
Prizzi's Honor Nicholson and Kathleen Turner are entertaining as amorous assassins in a smart black comedy that earns an Oscar for his then partner, Anjelica Huston. It is directed by her father, John.
Heartburn Meryl Streep and Nicholson add vital sparkle to an adultery melodrama, as former spouses based on Nora Ephron, who supplies the autobiographical screenplay, and the Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein.
Ironweed Nicholson and Streep reunite in haunting performances as derelict Depression-era alcoholics in Hector Babenco's bleak, underrated film of William Kennedy's novel.
Cast as the Joker, Nicholson chews up the scenery and, for good measure, the entire set.
The Two Jakes Confirming that lightning doesn't strike twice, Nicholson takes the helm as director and returns as investigator Jake Gittes in a misfired sequel to Chinatown.
A Few Good Men "You can't handle the truth," Nicholson's marine colonel bellows to Tom Cruise in the most memorable line from the court-martial drama scripted by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin.
The Crossing Guard Nicholson vividly plays a man racked with grief and intent on revenge when his young daughter is killed by a drunk driver. Sean Penn directs.
1997 As Good As It Gets On autopilot as a curmudgeon, Nicholson somehow wins his third Oscar (his second as best actor) for this creakingly contrived romantic comedy.
The Pledge Allowing himself to show his age, and directed by Sean Penn again, Nicholson gives a virtuoso performance as a detective about to retire when he becomes obsessed with the case of a murdered child-rape victim.
About Schmidt In a touchingly tender portrayal, Nicholson plays a lonely retired widower re-evaluating his life in Alexander Payne's compassionate road movie.
The Departed Nicholson is as flamboyantly satanic as only he can be without ever tilting the movie off balance, and he adopts a deliberately Oirish accent to sing a verse of Mother Macree in Martin Scorsese's dynamic morality thriller.