Jack Nicholson

If you're old enough to be reading the content on Cracked, you've heard of Jack Nicholson. He's escaped 50 years of typecasting by playing the devil, a werewolf, Jimmy Hoffa, and anyone else who's good at fucking shit up.

Just The Facts

In 1969 Mr. Nicholson co-starred with Peter Fonda (Easy Rider). In 2007 he co-starred with Morgan Freeman (Easy Reader).
Danced with the devil by the pale moonlight, got him drunk, and bludgeoned him to death. Used Bruce Wayne's excrement as a defense, found not guilty.
Frequently mistakes real-life for roles, scripts, movie sets.

Pre 1975 Jack

As mentioned above, if you don't know who Jack Nicholson is, you're a Quaker that got side-tracked while looking for farmporn, or you've had your frontal lobes removed. Speaking of which, go ahead and name a movie besides Easy Rider that Nicholson starred in prior to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Just one.

If you said "Little Shop of Horrors", "Five Easy Pieces", "Chinatown" or even "The Terror", congratulations: you are not just a fan of chaotic crazy-as-bat-shit antiheroes and villains, you are a connoisseur.

Though Mr. Nicholson is the only living male actor with 3 Oscar wins (out of 12 nominations), his three wins start with the aforementioned Cuckoo's Nest, peak with "Terms of Endearment" (1983) and end with "As Good As it Gets" (1997). Everything before was practice (when he wasn't busy boning a few of the 2000 women he's claimed to have slept with) and apparently everything since has been just for fun and nostalgia.

Little Shop of Horrors (1960). Jack has almost four minutes of screen time as an undertaker who enjoys pain. He laughs at any thought of it and outlives the main character, albeit with half the teeth he walked in with.

Some of us go to college to prepare for a career. Jack practiced crazy.

Psych Out/The Trip (1967). Far from the giggly square in Little Shop, Nicholson is "Stoney", a Haight-Ashbury musician with a hairline that's moving backwards. Though relatively tame, Stoney has his moments of psychotic undercurrent. When he first meets Jenny and learns she cannot hear he remarks "Let's kill her and eat her." Later on in the movie he states (prophetically) "Pretty soon the boogyman will get me." It wasn't this movie. Note how JN plays someone other than the psycho with the skill-saw.

Don't judge people, Jenny. Just kill them.

Head (1968) features Jack as a co-writer. It's a movie about the Monkees. The fucking Monkees. We here at Cracked were wondering what would possess Jack to co-write an 87-minute episode of the Monkees, until we learned it starts off with Micky Dolenz jumping from a bridge. Why not include the band in the title somewhere? Rumor has it a sequel was planned with the promotion: From the people who gave you Head." We'd like to think that was Jack's part of the writing.

Pictured: One of the guys that gave us Head.

Then there's this scene, where the "fourth wall" is broken and we see the ol' movie-within-a-movie trick. Jack is pictured in a white chapeau. Look close and you'll see Dennis Hopper apparently trying to find his chopper. Or Captain America. Or his drugs. Oh, and Peter Tork clocks the waitress.

Peter Tork hitting women before it was "in".

Five Easy Pieces (1970). The poignant snapshot of an oil rig worker who must return home when he learns his father is sick. A bit of a sleeper, but Nicholson manages to inject some life into the script and some beef into Sally Struthers, Karen Black, and the woman who plays his soon-to-be-sister-in-law. It is on the way to his family's island home that the famous diner scene plays out.

We'll have what he's having.

In the movie Jack, er, Robert confesses that when playing the piano he simply chose the easiest piece and played it without feeling. See, that's where the title comes from, only the "pieces" are the five people in his life! Genius! But honestly, Jack is much more enjoyable as a lunatic that put a two-headed penny on your railroad tracks of life.

And make me a sandwich.

Chinatown (1974). The final movie prior to Cuckoo's Nest, directed by another at-the-time hollywood heavyweight who also had problems keeping his dick dry, Roman Polanski. Nicholson plays J.J. Gittes, who appears to be the inspiration for a Calvin & Hobbes character, "Tracer Bullet".

"I have two 45s. One, I keep loaded. The other one keeps me loaded." ~Tracer Bullet

We do get a glimpse at the Jack-that's-yet-to-come in a scene with Faye Dunaway; both with an early "You can't handle the truth" kindof line and the possible origin of the term bitch slap. That's four open-handed and one back hand for you, Faye.

Five Easy Slaps.

After Chinatown comes the con-man who attempts evading jail by "acting" crazy, and proceeds to get his frontal lobes scrambled by Nurse Ratched, the only female match Jack meets onscreen before Helen Hunt.
This is always a good movie, especially when R.P. McMurphy is explaining his statutory activities and why he may be considered nuts.

We couldn't have said it any better.

We don't know Jack.

The man doesn't like to do interviews, and hasn't appeared on a talk show since before he was a household name. That makes it difficult to get any information from the source, so we'll just piece it together and call it good. To complete the cerebral coitus, ol' J.N. is involved with a number of charities such as ActionAid, which combats poverty, the Casey Lee Ball Foundation, which studies pediatric kidney diseases, and the Hole in the Wall Gang, which we think he joined by mistake.