He is the supervillain that the others (Heath Ledger, Joaquin Phoenix) were later measured against: the gurning, grinning, purple-clad bad guy whose capering craziness effortlessly upstaged Michael Keaton’s more demure Dark Knight. Nicholson played the Joker in an era when the superhero franchise wasn’t bigger than the star. He is the wealthy, alcoholic human-rights lawyer George Hanson, who helps out the two counterculture bikers Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, but is always getting thrown in the drunk tank himself. Nicholson is more than a character player, but hardly a pretty-boy lead. This was the movie that established 32-year-old Nicholson’s unique position in movies: intense, distinctive and seductive, the hair already starting to thin and the alligator grin beginning to make itself felt. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library/Alamy He is the cantankerous novelist with OCD and a need to insult and belittle everyone, including Helen Hunt’s waitress and Greg Kinnear’s gay artist. James L Brooks gave Nicholson a huge character turn in his bittersweet romantic comedy-drama constructed around his persona, which by this time had gone past the larger-than-life stage and was something else entirely: a one-man Mount Rushmore of movie stardom. He plays the ageing police detective Jerry Black, who, on his last day on the job, is called to a brutal child murder and promises the distraught mother he will find the killer, which becomes his obsession. One of the grandstanders of Nicholson’s late-career phase, in which he is settling into paunchy disillusionment, rage, fear, loneliness and a kind of wrecked and desperately salvaged decency. Lange and Nicholson have a raunchy sex scene on the kitchen table, covered in flour, which the first film’s star, Lana Turner, condemned as “pornographic trash”. In David Mamet’s take on the classic James M Cain noir, tougher than the 1946 version, Nicholson’s sexy-threat image is cranked up as the drifter who has an obsessive affair with Jessica Lange, the young wife of an old gas-station owner – and agrees to kill him. “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!” Jack Nicholson’s ferocious Col Nathan Jessup erupts from the court-martial witness stand under questioning from the wide-eyed idealist Tom Cruise, pursuing the suspicion that Nicholson’s high-ranking officer directly sanctioned violence and abuse. A Few Good Men (1992)Ī Few Good Men, 1992. Heartburn (1986)Īlongside his saturnine reputation for thrillers, tragedies, dark sexiness and general atavistic threat, Nicholson has long had a parallel career as the reformable rake in romantic comedies – could he have a heart of gold, despite that mad-bad-and-dangerous-to-know image? Here, he plays opposite another alpha-plus star, Meryl Streep, in Nora Ephron’s autobiographical marital breakup comedy. In Ride in the Whirlwind, he is a potent part of an outlaw trio. In The Shooting, he is the disturbing, black-clad gunslinger who menacingly follows a woman and the two men she has hired to accompany her. Nicholson produced and starred in both and wrote Ride in the Whirlwind. Monte Hellman shot these microbudget western cult classics back to back in the Utah desert. The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind (1966) Then they are contracted to whack each other. Nicholson is super-cool as the mid-ranking wiseguy falling in love with a beautiful woman (Kathleen Turner). John Huston’s hitman-hitwoman black comedy caper, anticipating the Mr & Mrs Smith shenanigans of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie 20 years later, was considered a brilliantly irreverent satirical take on the mafia, almost The Sopranos of its day.
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