The crisis that led Jack Nicholson to one of his finest moments: “It was a breakthrough for me”
One of the first prominent film roles that Jack Nicholson received praise for was George in Easy Rider. The film encapsulated the dying 1960s with its bleak vision of hopelessness, and Nicholson earned an Academy Award nomination for his supporting part—his first taste of success as a Hollywood star.
The actor’s career subsequently exploded, and he routinely found himself nominated for Oscars in movies like The Last Detail, Chinatown, and Five Easy Pieces before winning a golden statuette for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Nicholson is now regarded as one of the industry’s finest stars, and as he continued to appear in acclaimed movies like The Shining through to Terms of Endearment, Batman, As Good As It Gets, and The Departed, he has established himself as an enduring cinematic icon.
But what was Nicholson’s true breakthrough moment? It is safe to say that Five Easy Pieces can be classed as his life-changing acting job, taking him from being an applauded actor to a distinguished star. He played Bobby, a man who rejects his upper-class upbringing, including his skills as a talented pianist. His life is forever changed after he visits home – where his father is dying – with his current working-class life coming into conflict with his past.
Nicholson gave an incredible performance, delivering the memorable lines, “I guess you’re wondering what happened to me after my auspicious beginnings.” Yet, these words were conceived by the actor himself, who found himself in a state of “crisis” while rehearsing for the film directed by Bob Rafelson.
He explained during an interview with The New York Times, “I’m in conflict with Rafelson, because he fears my lacking ‘sentimentality.’ He’s always afraid I’m going to make the character too tough and too unapproachable for an audience. So we were down to a few scenes and he was nakedly now saying to me, ‘Hey, I want you to cry in this movie.’ Now that’s one thing, as an actor, you never say. You don’t go for an emotion – or one doesn’t if they work the way I do. And this is the last kind of direction you want to hear. But, everything is not class. This is the professional game.”
Nicholson got thinking of ideas to alter the monologue he would be delivering, and when it was time for them to film the scene, he was ready. “So we were out on the field where we shot it, and I wrote it that morning. I tried to get all of what I thought – as you know, I’ve been a writer also, I know why writers fear the thematic scene, and so I tried to get it down to the least amount of verbiage. And that phrase ‘auspicious beginnings’ is what I thought the guy was all about.”
His ideas proved to be perfect, and he delivered his lines with so much emotion. Nicholson was incredibly proud of his performance: “On take one, away I went. And I think it was a breakthrough. It was a breakthrough for me as an actor, for actors. I don’t think they’d had this level of emotion, really, in almost any male character until that point”.
