The most difficult role of Jack Nicholson’s career: “It took great courage to do what he did”
By the mid-1980s, Jack Nicholson was sitting pretty as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars and one of its most naturally gifted actors, having embarked on a staggering run of success the decade before that rocketed him from slumming actor and part-time screenwriter to A-list icon.
Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, Chinatown, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest were all released between 1969 and 1975, and he reaped the rewards. He landed Academy Award nominations for every single one of them, scooped ‘Best Actor’ for the latter, and became a byword for performative excellence.
It was a run of incredible turns in acclaimed pictures that strapped a rocket to his back, but in the movie business, momentum is arguably much harder to maintain than it is to generate. Not that anybody seemed to tell Nicholson, who leaned into his versatility to continue broadening his dramatic horizons and challenge himself as an actor.
If there was one thing the majority of his characters had in common during that period, it was that they all had at least one thing in common with the real Nicholson. He was charming, charismatic, intensely focused, more than a little wayward, prone to outbursts, afflicted with lingering emotional trauma and a touch resentful towards his surroundings and the people who populated them, so there was always something to draw on.
However, John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor was a completely different beast and a brand new type of challenge. Playing Charley Partanna opposite Kathleen Turner’s Irene Walkervisks, the pair sparkled as two hired killers tasked with eliminating the other, only for complications to inevitably arise when they fall in love with each other. On paper, it’s a skin Nicholson should have seamlessly slipped into.
And yet, because Charley was so stoic, single-minded, unassuming, relentlessly average, and played without the signature twinkle Nicholson always had in his eye, he struggled greatly to get a handle on the character. It didn’t show in the finished film, but producer John Foreman recalls the leading man having plenty of issues disassociating his persona from the part and leaving himself at the door.
“The part really put Jack through the wringer,” he told People. “It forced him to give up everything the public has loved about him in a picture like Terms of Endearment: his smile, his charm, his wit, his way of letting you in on the character’s naughty secrets. It took great courage to do what Jack did.”
A blackly comedic crime caper may not jump out as presenting a massive obstacle for a talent of Nicholson’s calibre to overcome, but that was precisely why he had his issues with Charley. He couldn’t lean into the very things that had made him the superstar he was, making it a performance powered by a uniquely Tinseltown sense of separation anxiety.
