Jack Nicholson names “the most erotic performance of my life”
Wearing his reputation as a mad shagger like a badge of honour, Jack Nicholson spent decades living up to his status as the hardest-partying star in Hollywood, with his raucous get-togethers becoming the stuff of legend.
In an era where virtually every high-profile celebrity was known to drink, dance, smoke, and snort the night away, the three-time Academy Award winner remained in a class entirely of his own. He may have enjoyed several lengthy relationships, but Nicholson became known for his inability to settle down, with his wayward eye and penchant for hellraising becoming part of his mythology.
Of course, he was able to leave all that baggage at the door when the cameras started rolling, allowing him to give a string of seminal performances in a cacophony of classics that only enhanced his aura as being one of the greatest actors in history by day, and one of the hardest-partying animals in Tinseltown by night.
By his own admission, though, Nicholson deliberately toned down what he perceived to be his inherent sexuality during his on-screen endeavours, although there were several exceptions to the rule. “I’ve always muted the sexuality that I always thought was my strong suit as an actor,” he mused to The Guardian before reflecting on the role he saw as the perfect opportunity to “do the most erotic performance of my life”.
Not that he was the first one to give it, with Bob Rafelson’s 1981 adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice marking the fourth time the book had been brought to the screen. Pierre Chernal’s The Last Turning, Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione, and Tay Garner’s The Postman Always Rings Twice saw Fernand Gravey, Massimo Girotti, and John Garfield play the lead roles in 1939, 1943, and 1946, respectively. However, Nicholson nonetheless put his own spin on it.
In Rafelson’s erotically-charged thriller, Nicholson’s drifter Frank Chambers stops in for a bite to eat at a Los Angeles diner, where he quickly ignites an affair with Jessica Lange’s Cora Smith, the much younger wife of John Colicos’ proprietor. Deciding the only way they can be together is to murder the husband to free her from a loveless marriage before the subsequent investigation attempts to pit them against each other.
Nicholson evidently enjoyed the opportunity to cut loose and present the most authentic and uninhibited version of himself he’d been allowed to portray in a while, even if his attempts to convince Rafelson the audience needed to see the boner tent-poling under his trousers during the kitchen sex scene didn’t go according to plan when the leading man couldn’t get it up. Everyone loves a trier, but even the A-lister with a fondness for the ladies “couldn’t do it” on command.
