Did being “overpraised” change Jack Nicholson’s career trajectory?
Hollywood can be a cutthroat landscape to navigate as an actor, and not even the biggest stars are immune to bad press. What has to sting even more, though, is when your own words are used against you. Acting legend Jack Nicholson found this out the hard way.
The esteemed actor, whose career spans over five decades, has starred in a plethora of smash hits. Films such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Tim Burton’s 1989 rendition of Batman, and Stanley Kubrick’s seminal horror opus The Shining are just scratching the surface. The latter two films Nicholson took on after the success of Cuckoo’s Nest, and thus, he began to feel fortune had smiled upon him.
During an interview with Martin Torgoff, Nicholson lamented, “I had been so lucky for so long as an actor that I felt overly praised. Well, I said that for two pictures, and they got up my ass for five years in a row. (…) people started applying a different standard to me and thinking, ‘Yeah, this fucking guy is overpraised. Let’s attack the living shit out of him!’ And they did.”
On the one hand, you could argue that with any level of stardom, especially when your name is mentioned in the same breath as some of the greatest to ever do it, there will always be critics. Hell, Nicholson has the most Academy Award nominations of any male actor, with 12 to his name, and succeeded in taking home three of them. It goes without saying that there were probably one or two people who didn’t quite get what all the fuss was about.
Even some of his biggest admirers haven’t shied away from critiquing the legendary actor. Director Tim Burton recounted his difficulty understanding Nicholson during the filming of Batman but still speaks highly of the confidence he instilled in the young director, saying Nicholson’s support helped see him through the production.
With some of the larger-than-life characters Nicholson portrayed throughout his career, The Joker included, it’s easy to see how that could be misconstrued as overacting. But a big personality yields big results. Rob Reiner learned as much directing him in A Few Good Men; in an interview for Jeremy Kagan’s book Director’s Close Up, Reiner describes what working with Nicholson was like.
Adding: “[Jack] knows what he’s doing, and he comes to play, every time out, full-out performance! And what it says to a lot of the other actors is, ‘Oooooh, I better get on my game here because this guy’s coming to play! So I can’t hold back; I’ve got to come up to him.’ He sets the tone.”
Clearly, Nicholson’s opinion of himself is much more modest than how his fellow actors perceive him. To me, any critique of Nicholson seems to stem from the idea that he hits out with the same shtick in the majority of his performances. But when your shtick is as good as his, it’s a lot easier to let that slide.
