Jack Nicholson’s bold claim of launching “more million-dollar actors” than anyone else in cinema history
Everyone in Hollywood can talk a good game, but the number of them who can actually back it up is nowhere near as high, although Jack Nicholson was one of the exceptions to the rule.
Subjectively, he’s one of the greatest actors of all time, a three-time Academy Award winner, and the most-nominated male actor in Academy Awards history. You don’t set those kinds of benchmarks without being among the very best, so he didn’t really need to sell himself as being good at his job.
As a result of those successes, Nicholson was also one of the highest-paid names in the industry. That does need to be justified, though, because no producer or studio is going to fork out millions upon millions of dollars for a star who can’t do the most important thing: put arses in seats.
Fortunately, he could do that, too. While it might smack of egotism to hear someone describe themselves as “probably the most successful actor in the history of movies,” as Nicholson once did, he wasn’t saying it for nothing, with the reformed hell-raiser pulling out the receipts to prove his point.
From Easy Rider onward, the only two of his pictures that didn’t end up in the black were Mike Nichols’ The Fortune and Tony Richardson’s The Border, and when you consider that he made upwards of 50 films after the counterculture classic, financially speaking, he really might be the most successful actor in the history of movies.
That didn’t quite translate to his behind-the-camera career, with Nicholson’s directorial gigs failing to take off in the same way as his reliably bankable performative outings. And yet, he still tried to position himself in the history books and turn a negative into a positive when his sophomore effort failed to live up to expectations.
“I mean, you know, Goin’ South produced more million-dollar actors from obscurity than any movie in history,” he suggested to The Washington Post. “Mary Steenburgen, John Belushi, Chris Lloyd, Danny DeVito.” He’s right, albeit only to a certain extent, since most of those names who did indeed become nine-figure players weren’t unknowns that he rocketed to prominence.
Steenburgen was, to be fair, but Belushi was already a household name in America from Saturday Night Live, while Lloyd and DeVito had both appeared in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and their careers respectively went up a notch a month before Goin’ South was released when the sitcom Taxi premiered.
Still, has any other movie featured as many future high-flyers before they were famous? American Graffiti, Dazed and Confused, The Outsiders, Do the Right Thing, Black Hawk Down, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood might want to have a word, since they’ve all got a good shot at blowing Goin’ South out of the water on that front.
