“That picture got me”: the first movie Jack Nicholson “got insane” over
You don’t see too much of Jack Nicholson these days, which is a real shame because he really is the definition of a legendary movie star with pure charisma for decades, all dark shades, raised eyebrows and a dazzling grin, that has sustained until around ten years ago when he took a step back from public life, his final film made in 2010.
And when you go back to the start of his career, much more than half a century ago, and you look at the performances he put in and the standard of films he was making on an alarmingly regular basis, you then have to start to think where you put him in the list of the greatest to ever do it; pretty bloody near the top would be my answer to that.
If you’ve seen Nicholson weep in front of his father in Five Easy Pieces, or turn a mental hospital upside down in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or terrorise Shelley Duvall in The Shining, then you’ll know that Nicholson was an unrivalled talent, an actor that you absolutely could not take your eyes off for a single second he was on screen.
But the sheer amount of gems he appeared in that don’t get the headlines some of his best remembered roles do is also staggering; there’s Carnal Knowledge from The Graduate director Mike Nichols, Roman Polanski’s neo-noir Chinatown, the ‘Best Picture’ winning Terms of Endearment and Warren Beatty’s Reds for a start, and that is of course without even mentioning his later roles in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed or the Tom Cruise military drama A Few Good Men.
Nicholson quite simply rarely missed, where if a film he was in wasn’t already great, then he would seize it and elevate it simply by the standard of performance he demonstrated so routinely, for 30 years.
As with most artists, his ability to deliver on such a consistent level stemmed from his passion for what he did and the world he was involved in. He began as a TV actor in the 1950s but struggled for a decade, sometimes leaning back on a secondary career as a writer and director.
However, he grew up as a class-clown kid enraptured by the westerns showing at his local cinema, once saying many years ago, “I was a tremendous movie fan. I mean, I got insane over Thunderhead, which was the sequel to My Friend Flicka. I mean, me and my two guys…my mom kept a box of pennies, and I used to reach in there and take a handful, and we went every day. That picture got me. I always loved movies.”
Thunderhead, Son of Flicka to give it its full name, was a western from 1945, when Nicholson was just eight years old. Starring the English and American actor Roddy McDowell and Rita Johnson, it told the tale of warring ranchers breeding wild stallions and racing them in the wilds of Utah and Oregon. It was a commercial hit, bringing in some $2.5million at the box office, a fortune for the time.
Five years later, he would travel to California, taking an office job as a teen at the MGM Cartoon studio. Despite being offered work as an animator, Nicholson declined because even at that age, he knew he wanted to be an actor. He landed a first acting role in 1956, and his debut film role arrived in 1958, in a low-budget movie called Cry Baby Killer.
