Jack Nicholson: The “big deal” who Meryl Streep called the Bob Dylan of cinema
Signing up Meryl Streep to any project is now considered a major coup, but in 1986, as she penned her deal for the comedy-drama Heartburn, Streep might have been considered playing second-fiddle to her co-star Mandy Patinkin.
A Broadway legend, Patinkin and Streep instantly connected. They shared a fair friendship that would make shooting, especially the intimate sex scenes, all the more tolerable. Sadly, for both actors, Patinkin was unceremoniously fired from the role after only a few days.
While the two may have shared a friendship, director Mike Nicholls believed there was no spark of chemistry between them. Instead, he would save the production from intense studio scrutiny by hiring the legendary Jack Nicholson.
When comparing a theatre legend to a Hollywood leading man, the differences are like night and day, and it changed the production for Streep. It was an intimidating proposition, made all the more so by Nichols’s insistence on manufacturing events to foster tension between the two actors before it came time to shoot. Streep claimed she wound up in a state of awe at the prospect of even meeting Nicholson, admitting, “It was like meeting Mick Jagger or Bob Dylan. He was a big deal.”
To Nicholson’s credit, though, he didn’t want his co-star to be overwhelmed by meeting him, and he certainly didn’t want her to think of him in such exalted status as the “Bob Dylan of cinema.” So, just before they were due to shoot their first scene together, Nicholson came up with a neat trick to skewer any nervous energy in the air and watch that balloon deflate. “To break that tension,” Nicholson’s biographer Marc Eliot wrote, “just before their first scene together, Nicholson knocked on Streep’s trailer door and asked if he could use her toilet. She said sure. End of tension.”
Like most film fans, Streep had been anticipating meeting Nicholson for a long time. The Oscar-winning star of Chinatown and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was an undeniable draw. But Nicholson had also been dying to meet and work with Streep, having come close when she was offered Jessica Lange’s role in The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Fascinatingly, if Heartburn producer Bob Greenhut is to be believed, Streep wasn’t intimidated or overawed by Nicholson for too long – because the Shining star fell madly in love with her. Soon, Greenhut claimed Nicholson was suggesting, “Let’s go over our lines together later,” and “Maybe we can have dinner,” which changed the atmosphere from tense to cringingly awkward for a few reasons. Number one: Streep was married. Number two: Nichols was also pining for her.
Yes, Greenhut claimed Streep’s director didn’t make any attempt to disguise his “severe crush” on his star, although he didn’t act on it in anywhere near the same way as Nicholson. Once again, take all this with a grain of rumour salt, but Greenhut alleged that Streep had to fend off some pretty amorous advances from Nicholson at times. “Meryl was good at defusing all this,” he said, “but she had a good way of throwing cold water on Jack whenever he got a little too friendly.”
Had Nicholson gone from being the untouchable “Bob Dylan of cinema” to a sex pest over the course of one movie shoot? Maybe. After all, it was heavily reported in the tabloids that Streep vowed never to work with Nicholson again after she was forced to throw him out of her hotel room.
The rumours have circulated ever since, but Streep has never been public in her telling of the story. However, she did work with Nicholson again on Ironweed a few years later, at which point the rumour mill got working again, this time noting that the affection was reciprocated and they engaged in an affair. We may never know what really went on, but we do have two of the greatest living actors of all time in two movies as proof of their chemistry.
