The Oscar-winning actor who owes their entire career to Jack Nicholson: “Every single thing”
Even the actors who become legends need to start at the bottom, and it helps if they can find a mentor willing to guide them at the beginning of their careers. Jack Nicholson had one, and once he’d become one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, he took a member of the next generation under his wing.
Of course, the future three-time Academy Award winner and ‘New Hollywood’ icon wasn’t the only person to benefit from Roger Corman’s tutelage, but he never forgot the impact the B-movie titan made on his professional life. They worked together on multiple projects, and his influence was so massive that it’s debatable if he was even the prolific producer’s most successful protege.
By the end of the 1970s, which included a remarkable run where he landed five Oscar nominations in six years, winning his first for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nicholson sat comfortably atop the A-list. As many actors do when they’ve reached that point, he decided to dip his toes back into directorial waters by helming Goin’ South, his first feature from behind the camera in almost a decade.
The production was defined by the tensions between Nicholson and John Belushi, but what’s lesser-known is that the former fought hard to cast Mary Steenburgen as the female lead. She’d never been in a movie before, and the executives were pushing for a more established name to be cast in an effort to draw in a bigger audience, but he wasn’t having it.
“He had to fight for me because Paramount said, ‘Yeah, that’s the best screen test, but you’ve got to pick your second choice because she’s never done anything, she has a weird last name, you pick number two, all of whom are huge stars,'” Steenburgen recalled to Insider. “And he fought for me. He said, ‘Then we don’t do the movie’. And the movie was shut down for a few days until they relented.'”
Goin’ South wasn’t a hit, so the studio may have had a point, but Steenburg reaped the rewards of having Nicholson fight her corner. Her performance got her on the Golden Globes shortlist for ‘New Star of the Year’ in 1978, and it wasn’t long before she had an Oscar of her own.
If she hadn’t been cast in Goin’ South, then she may not have ended up in Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard, which was released 23 months after she’d debuted in Nicholson’s film and ultimately won her the Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actress’. Understandably, she’s never forgotten. “He was my mentor,” Steenburgen said. “And I owe every single thing to him.”
