Jack Nicholson on “all you need” to be an actor
Widely regarded as one of the greatest actors of his generation, the retired legend Jack Nicholson led a long and varied career. Thanks to his bold, pointed eyebrows and devilish smile, the actor was cast by several top-flight directors as the perfect villain, whether it’s Frank Costello in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed or Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s Stephen King adaptation The Shining.
Nicholson’s broad scope has also allowed him to flourish in more complex roles of moral balance, including those in Miloš Forman’s 1975 drama One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Roman Polanski’s noir thriller of the previous year, Chinatown. For his trouble, the Hollywood icon has picked up three Academy Awards: two for ‘Best Actor’ and one for ‘Best Supporting Actor’.
So, what’s Nicholson’s secret? For him, it’s all about confidence and self-discipline. As an early method actor and crucial influence on the likes of Daniel Day-Lewis, Nicholson frequently improvised to give his roles a distinctive nuance. That said, he never hesitated to swim out of his depth and put his talent to the test.
In Vivian Kubrick’s documentary Making The Shining, Nicholson explained how having an open mind kept his acting style fresh. “When I come up against a director who has a concept that, maybe, I don’t agree with it […] I’d be more prone to go with them than my own because I want to be out of control as an actor. I want them to have the control. Otherwise, it’s going to become predictably my work. And that’s not fun.”
Continuing, Nicholson suggested that actors shouldn’t have just “one set of theories”.
He added: “You can go for years saying, ‘I’m gonna get this thing real because they really haven’t seen it real’ […] and then you come up against someone like Stanley who says, ‘Yeah, it’s real, but it’s not interesting.'”
In a 1982 interview, Nicholson reflected on his rise to success over the previous decade. He gave some simple advice for developing actors. “All you really need as a developing actor is just to be trying to do it well. If you can live with the humiliation, you know, of being in something where it’s pretty funny,” he said, stressing the importance of confidence.
Continuing, the Chinatown actor revealed why he was fortunate to rise to prominence in his 30s. “I always have felt that I was lucky because if I had been successful that early, I’d be in a position where I was trying to make a comeback now,” he pondered. “The first show that I was in, Michael Landon was the star actor in it and while we were doing the play, he got [a role in] Bonanza. So all of my career, up until [1973] when Michael left Bonanza, went on while he was on Bonanza. That was very good for him – everyone was envious as I would be naturally at the time, but in reality, now, obviously, I wouldn’t trade it with him.”
Although Nicholson wouldn’t be arrogant enough to mention it, his degree of acting talent relied on intelligence, something Stanley Kubrick discerned before casting him in The Shining. In a 1986 article in The New York Times, titled ‘The Method and Mystique of Jack Nicholson’, writer Ron Rosenbaum quoted Kubrick as saying that Nicholson brought to his roles “the one unactable quality – great intelligence.”
Watch one of Jack Nicholson’s classic scenes from The Shining below.
