The actor Jack Nicholson considered the greatest of his era: “Maybe the best we have”
For Jack Nicholson to dub another actor the best of their generation is the kind of praise reserved for only the highest echelon of performers, where he himself is, to many people, the greatest of all time, let alone his generation.
According to Nicholson, the concerned star began his leading man career around the same time as him, and the mid-1970s saw both men take home Oscars on Hollywood’s biggest night, and their respective decades are littered with several of the greatest American films ever made. Ironically, the one movie they made together, helmed by one of Old Hollywood’s most enduring directors, failed to capitalise on the incredible good fortune of having two generational talents in one vehicle, and was relegated to a blip in their roster of success.
Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon was released in 1976, at the height of both actors’ critical highs, as the year saw Nicholson win ‘Best Actor’ for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the one following saw Robert De Niro’s ‘Best Supporting Actor’ win for The Godfather Part II. An industry insider story based on an unfinished F Scott Fitzgerald novel, it told the story of De Niro’s Monroe Stahr, a creative production mogul at a Hollywood studio during the Golden Age. Nicholson appeared in a few key scenes as a communist labour organiser named Brimmer trying to unionise screenwriters, and as soon as he entered the picture, audiences scooched forward expectantly.
In the end, the most intense game of ping-pong in cinema history, followed by a fight that results in Brimmer easily knocking Stahr out cold, was perhaps not quite what people were imagining. Could that really be the sum total of Nicholson and De Niro’s onscreen dalliance, never to be repeated? Unfortunately, yes, and while the scenes still served as a highlight (of sorts), they weren’t enough to rescue the film, which tanked at the box office and disappointed critics, who clearly expected a hell of a lot more from an assemblage of such a rogue’s gallery of talent.
Despite their sole collaboration being a damp squib, it didn’t stop Nicholson from later declaring De Niro the best actor of his era. However, in 1997, when asked by The Independent regarding his process of choosing directors to work with in his career, which saw him choosing Bob Rafelson for six films but never anything with Francis Ford Coppola or Martin Scorsese, the actor admitted that it wasn’t for a lack of trying, and De Niro may have inadvertently blocked access to one of those cinematic giants.
“I don’t know,” Nicholson offered with a furrowed brow, “I was going to do Tucker with Francis Coppola. We had a mutual interest in that, but then he had this passing idea to do it as a musical, and we parted company.” When it came to Scorsese, he specifically noted he’d “love” to work with the Goodfellas icon, and admitted they had chatted about him playing the lead in the filmmaker’s section of the anthology New York Stories, but Nick Nolte ended up beating him to it.
At this point, the actor offered his slightly menacing grin and noted, “Of course, Martin has this working relationship with Robert De Niro”, hinting that, in those days at least, it wasn’t as easy for someone like him to be cast in a Marty joint as everyone may think, especially when his creative muse was already “maybe the best we have”.
Thankfully, Nicholson did manage to hook up with the veteran nine years later in The Departed, and almost crossed paths with De Niro for a second time, but being uninterested in playing the kindly police captain role in Scorsese’s Boston crime epic, Martin Sheen stepped up instead, leaving us yet to see the two reunite.
