The one scene Jack Nicholson wrote for ‘The Shining’: “That’s what I was like when I got my divorce”
Although his legacy will always be that of an all-time acting great with three Academy Awards and a litany of iconic performances to their name, Jack Nicholson was once a semi-prolific screenwriter who found himself behind the typewriter almost as often as he found himself in front of the camera.
After making his debut as a scribe on 1963 action flick Thunder Island, Nicholson notched a number of credits in a short period of time. Between his first script and and the release of psychedelic The Monkees movie Head five years later, he was stretching himself thin as a multi-faceted creative mind.
Those five years saw him act in nine features, of which he was either the writer or co-writer of three. He penned two that he didn’t even star in, but after that, his one and only credit as a writer came on his feature-length directorial bow Drive, She Said in 1971. Since then, he never put pen to paper again. At least, not in a capacity large enough to have his name listed among the writers.
That background – not to mention his A-list star power – gave Nicholson the ability and leeway to put his own stamp on a number of the characters he’d go on to play, several of whom were ironically writers by trade. Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, Mike Nichols’ Heartburn, and Warren Beatty’s Reds were among them, but the most iconic by far was, without a doubt, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Nicholson’s Jack Torrance slips closer and closer to the brink of madness while also contending with a debilitating case of writers’ block, and the actor took it upon himself to add his own flourishes to a scene that masterfully details the simmering rage prevalent in both, no easy feat when Kubrick was notorious for maintaining an iron grip on every frame of his filmography.
“That’s the one scene in the movie I wrote myself,” he told The New York Times. “That scene at the typewriter; that’s what I was like when I got my divorce. I was under the pressure of being a family man with a daughter and one day I accepted a job to act in a movie in the daytime and I was writing a movie at night and I’m back in my little corner and my beloved wife, Sandra, walked in on what was, unbeknownst to her, this maniac.”
When he regaled that experience to Kubrick, the studious auteur decided that it was a worthy addition to The Shining. “I remember being at my desk and telling her, ‘Even if you don’t hear me typing it doesn’t mean I’m not writing. This is writing’. I remember that total animus. Well, I got a divorce.”
Nicholson’s divorce from Sandra Knight was finalised in 1968, right at the peak of his screenwriting career and more than a decade before The Shining, so those feelings were ones he’d clearly been holding onto for quite some time before Kubrick gave him the go-ahead to make it an intrinsic part of the character in a spine-chilling psychological masterpiece.
