The actor Jack Nicholson calls the “John Wayne of his generation”
After shooting to fame through a series of impeccably crafted performances that wasted little time, marking him out as one of the best in the business, Jack Nicholson gradually broadened his horizons the longer his career went on.
During the most fruitfully prolific period of his career, the star could almost always be found tearing the house down with a powerhouse dramatic performance, a generation-defining hot streak that saw him win two Academy Awards from seven nominations in the space of only 14 years. Of course, a record-breaking third win and another five nods lay in his future, but the latter stages of his career saw him take it a little easier.
Nicholson himself would be the first to admit that there was a major shift in the way he selected his roles at the turn of the 21st century, with more comedic and light-hearted fare becoming increasingly prevalent as he chased something entirely different from the immersive and all-consuming characters that had defined him for decades.
He was still a massive star, though, and maintaining that level of celebrity for such an extended period of time is a very difficult thing to achieve. With that in mind, it’s the highest of praise coming from Nicholson for anyone to earn a direct comparison to John Wayne, one of Hollywood’s most enduring icons and a monolithic figure in the history of celluloid who dominated an entire genre for decades on end.
Whereas Wayne was intrinsically linked to the Western, Nicholson’s apples-for-oranges estimation came from the unheralded difficulties of working in big special effects-driven movies. It wasn’t an arena he was all that familiar with outside of teaming with Tim Burton on Batman and Mars Attacks!, but as he told Total Film, “There are no mistakes at that level of acting.”
“People don’t get to be movie stars if they’re no good,” he continued. “I knew Harrison Ford would be huge, and I always call Harrison the John Wayne of his generation because as an actor, I know how hard that stuff is to make believable.” Whereas for ‘The Duke’ it was the dusty plains and his trusty six-shooter, for Ford it was a galaxy far, far away and the death-defying adventures of a treasure-hunting archaeologist.
There’s definitely a difference between being an actor and being a movie star, but there are plenty to have mastered both. Nicholson was one of them, Ford was clearly another given that he’s spent nearly half a century on the A-list, while Julia Roberts, Keanu Reeves, and “the two Toms” were also singled out by the three-time Oscar winner, and nobody’s going to argue that Cruise and Hanks are just as capable at doing drama as they are anchoring crowd-pleasing escapism.
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