Jack Nicholson on the worst fate that can befall an actor: “Worse than being totally unknown”
The hardest part of trying to make it as an actor is breaking into the business in the first place. Once that foot gets in the door, then talent will eventually take somebody to the top if they’re good enough, even if it was a while before Jack Nicholson got there.
It’s almost impossible to spy a talent at the very beginning of their career and predict with the utmost certainty they’ve got what it takes to crack the A-list after embarking on a legendary run, something Nicholson wrestled with first-hand during his formative years in the industry.
He made his feature debut in the 1958 teen thriller The Cry Baby Killer, but it wouldn’t be until a decade later that he was heralded as having star potential when counterculture classic Easy Rider served as his mainstream breakthrough. Fortunately, Nicholson was never out of work for too long, and a lot of that had to do with his multifaceted skill set.
Becoming a regular collaborator of Roger Corman when he wasn’t acting, Nicholson was a semi-prolific screenwriter, notching five script credits in five years between 1963 and 1968. He was gainfully employed, but he was nowhere near a hot commodity. As he admitted to The Independent, working his way up the ranks was as thankless as it gets.
“It’s the worst possible position for an actor,” he said of his regular contributions to acting in and writing B-movies. “I was making a living. Everyone who knew me said I was good, but everyone who knew me said I wouldn’t make it because I hadn’t made it so far. I think that’s worse than being totally unknown.”
Nicholson was a known presence and a fixture of the lower-tier arena that mentor Corman made his name, but for somebody with ambitions and aspirations as lofty as his, that simply wasn’t good enough. He wanted to be a big-name actor, and he believed he was good enough to seize Hollywood by the horns, but he was wary of being pigeonholed as a B-movie guy.
“Of course, I suffered the normal story of angst,” he confessed. “But I’d already decided that I’d direct instead.” There’s a heavy dose of irony to be found in Nicholson opting to make his own films when the opportunities he’d been waiting for hadn’t presented themselves, considering what ended up happening.
He made his first feature behind the camera in 1971 when he helmed Drive, She Said, but he’d never direct again. The remainder of the decade catapulted him to the top of the A-list following a string of towering performances in The Last Detail, Chinatown, The King of Marvin Gardens, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and The Missouri Breaks, among others.
