Moviefone Editorial

Tag: jack-nicholson

  • 21 Things You Never Knew About ‘A Few Good Men’

    This week marks the 25th anniversary of the release of “A Few Good Men.”

    Landing in theaters on December 13, 1992, the military courtroom drama became director Rob Reiner‘s biggest hit, put future Oscar-winner Aaron Sorkin on the map as a screenwriter, gave Tom Cruise one of his most memorable and best roles, and gifted Jack Nicholson with the most unforgettable line of his career.

    Still, as often as you’ve watched Cruise and Demi Moore face off in court against Nicholson, there’s a lot you may not know about “A Few Good Men,” including the real-life story behind it, the script’s journey from cocktail napkins to the screen, or the time Kevin Pollak‘s mom hit on Nicholson while he was trying to play his courtroom scene.
    1. The story is based on a real-life 1986 incident at Guantanamo Bay, one that is very much like the “code red” hazing depicted in the film. As in the movie, the victim was a Marine named Willie who had snitched about a fence-line shooting into Cuban territory. There, his fellow Marines, acting on orders, gagged him until his lungs filled with fluid. Unlike in the film, Willie survived the code red, thanks to treatment at six different hospitals.

    2. Sorkin, then an aspiring playwright, learned of the incident from his sister Deborah, then a recent law school grad, who served in the Navy’s Judge Advocate General Corps, on the team defending the accused Marines. Her story became the basis for his first play.
    3. Sorkin wrote much of “A Few Good Men” on cocktail napkins while serving as a bartender at Broadway’s Palace Theater, scribbling lines while patrons sat through the first act of “La Cage Aux Folles.” He and his roommates pooled their resources to buy an early Macintosh desktop with 512K of memory, where he’d type up his napkin work and revise it.

    4. Eventually, he had a play, which his agent sold to producer David Brown, who bought the film rights even before the show was mounted on Broadway, with Tom Hulce in the lead. The drama opened in 1989 and ran for more than a year.
    5. Reiner (above) was drawn to the story because he identified with protagonist Lt. Daniel Kaffee, a Navy lawyer trying to live up to the example set by his legal-giant father. Reiner had spent the first two decades of his career toiling in the shadow of his comedy-legend dad, sitcom star as a serious filmmaker striking out on his own.

    6. Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson may have been obvious choices to play the two main adversaries, but other roles were harder to cast. Linda Hamilton and Jodie Foster were both up for the role of Kaffee’s colleague, Lt. Cdr. JoAnne Galloway, before Demi Moore won the part. Moore, who was eight months pregnant when she auditioned, wanted the role because it was “genderless” and even agreed to play Galloway for just $2 million, well below her fee at the time.
    FGWGOODMEN-SPTI-02.tif7. For fellow lawyer Lt. Sam Weinberg, the filmmakers first thought of Seinfeld,” was renewed for a second season, Alexander became unavailable, so the role went to comedian and impressionist Pollak.

    8. Reiner had a certain look in mind for an actor to play the honor-bound lead Marine defendant, Lance Cpl. Harold Dawson. He realized that the man who looked like what he wanted was right under his nose, in the person of Wolfgang Bodison, a former Castle Rock mail boy who had become Reiner’s personal assistant and a Castle Rock location scout. He’d never acted before, but Reiner auditioned him and cast him in his film debut alongside the likes of Cruise, Moore, and Nicholson.
    9. Sorkin said he enjoyed working for Reiner, even though the director ordered him to make countless, rigorous revisions of his screenplay. One major revision: unlike in the play, where a doctored logbook is the smoking gun that gives Kaffee the break he needs, Reiner insisted that Cruise’s Kaffee win the case on courtroom skills alone.

    10. Some of the revisions were rumored to have been written by William Goldman, the screenwriter behind Reiner’s “The Princess Bride” and “Misery.” Sorkin reportedly liked some of the changes so much that he incorporated them into later editions of the play.
    11. Sorkin hated, however, the revision requests he got from the studio. One asked why Galloway had to be a woman if she was never going to sleep with Kaffee. Sorkin’s reply: “Women have purposes other than to sleep with Tom Cruise.” Sorkin did write one draft, however, that ended with Kaffee asking Galloway out on a date after the trial ends, but overall, he cited his dealings with Columbia on “A Few Good Men” as his worst experience as a screenwriter.

    12. Much of the movie consists of indoor scenes shot on a Columbia soundstage in Hollywood, but the Washington, D.C. outdoor scenes were filmed on location. The building that plays the JAG Corps headquarters was actually a former psychiatric hospital. Years after the filming, it became the HQ for the Department of Homeland Security.
    13. After “24,” it’s easy to think there’s nothing Kiefer Sutherland can’t do, but back in 1992, he still had trouble driving a Jeep. The scene where his Lt. Jonathan Kendrick escorts the Navy lawyers around the Guantanamo base had to be shot several times because Sutherland reportedly kept clipping the Marines playing extras.

    14. The Guantanamo Bay barracks scenes were filmed on an Air Force base near Los Angeles.
    15. Supporting player Nicholson received $5 million for just 10 days of shooting as Col. Nathan Jessup. Still, he worked hard for his money. He had to deliver his now-famous courtroom speech, at full intensity, as many as 50 times, even when Reiner was just using his performance off-camera to generate reaction shots from the other actors.

    16. Pollak was unnerved during that sequence because his mom was on the set, sitting off-camera behind Nicholson and hitting on him. (You can watch Pollak’s hilarious recounting of this anecdote, complete with the comic’s dead-on Nicholson impression, here.)
    17. Frequent Sorkin actor Josh Malina, who plays Jessup’s clerk, Tom, is the only actor in the film who was also in the Broadway production. “A Few Good Men” marked his movie debut.

    18. Sorkin himself has a cameo, as a lawyer bragging in a bar.
    19. “A Few Good Men” cost at least $33 million to make; some sources put the cost as high as $41 million. At least half the budget went toward paying the salaries of the A-list cast and director, before even a foot of film was shot. (Cruise earned a reported $12.5 million. Reiner took home a reported $4 million. Even Sutherland, in a fairly small supporting part, landed a reported $1 million.) The movie earned back $141 million in North America and another $102 million overseas. It remains the biggest career hit for both Reiner and Sorkin.

    20. The Academy nominated “A Few Good Men” for four Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Nicholson), Best Editing, and Best Sound Mixing. Somehow — Cruise was not nominated. Which is six different flavors of wrong.
    21. The West Wing,” played the Cruise role in a London stage production of “A Few Good Men” in 2005.

  • ‘Training Day’ Stars Bonded Over Real-Life Street Gang Encounters

    2017 Winter TCA PortraitsThey’re not exactly playing a buddy-cop dynamic in their new CBS police drama “Training Day,” but Bill Paxton and Justin Cornwell have already bonded off-screen after some edgy ride-alongs with real-life cops and a shared love of classic films.

    The relationship between screen veteran Paxton — who plays the morally ambiguous, ends-justify-the-means detective Frank Roarke in a street-level LAPD crime unit — and emerging star Cornwell — whose rookie cop Kyle Craig has been assigned to infiltrate Roake’s team — is hardly the uneasy alliance their characters share. Off screen, the two actors enjoy a relaxed chemistry they cultivated in both the back seats of police cars and shooting the breeze about their favorite movies in between scenes.

    Paxton and Cornwell showed just how simpatico they are in a freewheeling chat with Moviefone, in which they recalled sharing some of their tensest moments researching in the streets of Los Angeles, and those performers that inspire them both — including original “Training Day” film star Denzel Washington.

    Moviefone: As actors, you do these ride-alongs with police to prep for roles like these. Tell me about those experiences — not even necessarily for the research, but just what you’re going through when things get a little freaky.

    Justin Cornwell: For me, it was just keeping my wits about me and not showing any of that fear. I feel like if you’ve got that, they’ll know it. I didn’t want to be like, “Oh, I’m afraid to talk to this person because he’s tatted out and he looks like he might …”

    Bill Paxton: This guy, Bob Deemer, he’s been working out of Newton division for 28 years. I went out with him a few times. He knows everybody. First thing, he pulls us into a park, and there are these OGs there, hang out in the park, play dominos, drink those 40s and stuff. They all knew me from films and stuff like that.

    Cornwell: “Weird Science“!

    Paxton: Yeah, “Weird Science.” We start talking to them, and then we went down another street, and there were these guys sitting out in front of a classic Hollywood stucco court. And he was saying, you know, “They did a drive by here. They shot about 100 rounds here. You can still see all the bullet holes and everything.” You see this one guy, and Bob’s in the car, he goes, “Yeah, man, you can tell: somebody’s marinated.”

    Cornwell: “Baked”?

    Paxton: Yeah, “He’s baked.” I don’t know what he said — whatever he said, it was weird. But it was weird because he was talking as if looking at this guy in the third person in a weird kind of way. Then he wants us to talk, and this guy wouldn’t talk to us at all. We’re seeing the other guys are kind of wary like, “What the hell is this?” And Bob tells them, “We’re not here to roust you or bust you or anything. They’re just actors and they want to talk to you.” I was like, “Oh hey, Mr. Gangster! Me and my partner, we’re actors.”

    “Help us workshop a scene.”

    Paxton: That makes me uncomfortable. I’m more the kind of guy that just kind of wants to just be the fly on the wall. I don’t want to interact with these guys. It was interesting. Bob was using my celebrity in terms of breaking the ice. But he knows everybody there. These guys spend all their professional lives — well, this guy did: 28 years in the same community. It’s a big area. It’s finite to them after a while. It was strange, but interesting stuff. Then we went over and those guys gave us those funky food, remember? Those Cambodian guys.

    Cornwell: Yeah. Beef jerky.

    Paxton: Yeah. That stuff was nasty! You’re trying to eat it, kind of look like they’re bonding with you. Again, it was cool that these Cambodian guys, ended up in this Bloods controlled neighborhood, and how they initially fought it out, but then earned each other’s respect. Now they all interact. Some of the Cambodian guys are in Blood gangs and stuff like that. It’s a whole other culture out there. It’s tough. It’s a hard part of town, man. Everything’s barred. It’s tough. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a cop every day like that.

    How do you take what you see out there and apply it?

    Paxton: This is what you do as an actor. You’re asked to take on a role, so you’ve got to go out and see how that role in the real world exists and how it works. So it’s skill of observation and research, then you add your imagination to that, and you build a character. And at the end of the day, you might find all kinds of stuff, great stuff, but that’s not what they’re doing in the show.

    Cornwell: Sometimes, also, going back to script stuff, you said, “Hey man, I heard this really great piece of lingo that they use. We could use that in the show,” and then it becomes a little more authentic.

    Paxton: Yeah. “Hey, how’d that cop say that when he made that call?” That’s the kind of stuff I’m making notes of. Just that stuff.

    Cornwell: Devil’s in the details.

    Paxton: Yeah. That work helps give the actor conviction of character. When you’re watching it, you believe that guy’s in that world. Everybody works differently.

    What’s interesting about this take on “Training Day” is that there’s so much middle ground to cover: It’s not a story of Justin’s character, Kyle, getting corrupted or Bill’s character, Frank, getting redeemed just yet. They’re sort of meeting in the middle, and we’re going to see where this goes. Tell me what that means to you, to be able to go in any different direction at this stage in the game.

    Cornwell: It’s fun for me. I love being able to take a character and find out what he’s doing. This is a brand-new situation for me. I’ve always done theater where my characters had a completed arc. You can imagine what they did, but you never really explored it. Here we get to explore that. We get to imagine what could happen.

    Paxton: Look, it’s a heightened reality. But we have to ground it so it’s not so heightened that it’s just like, “I can’t buy this.” Obviously, if we shot off that many rounds, and had that many round shot at us, I was saying, we would be not only Swiss cheese, but we’d be completely suspended or banned from working near any police force on any planet.

    It’s exciting stuff. It’s Jerry Bruckheimer bringing that kind of “Top Gun” sensibility to an hour drama on CBS. I think, for CBS, it’s kind of pushing the envelope a little bit. The networks, they’ve got to compete with a lot of good cable shows now that they never had to years ago. But when I said, I said something in there, I started to go off on it, I dig the idea of being in a populist show that is going out to places where they know they don’t get any kind of elite TV package or anything. They can’t afford it.

    It’s free TV stuff. Yeah, we’re going to be selling a lot of Viagra and everything else. It’ll get out there. These stories, at the end of the day, they have a moral. A lot of it is rough justice, but you have to sometimes fight fire with fire, and you have to stand up, and you’ve got to look out for the people who are your family. It’s about loyalty and compassion, but also having to do the hard thing … Here we’ve got a show that I feel is fun, it’s entertaining, there’s some moral issues involved, and let’s go.

    I’m sure you didn’t imagine, when this project got off the ground, how polarized this country was going to be by the time the show comes out. Here we are now, and I’m watching the show thinking there’s going to be a lot of people watching the show that are 100% with Bill from the first episode — “You’ve got to get the job done” — and the others are 100% with Justin going, “You’ve got to play by the rules.”

    Cornwell: I tell you, I saw the polarization. I’ve seen it my whole life.

    Paxton: I’m sure you have. He came from Louisville, Kentucky. He’s seen polarization.

    Cornwell: So I felt like the show was doing something where it could service a lot of different communities. It wasn’t just serving one side of that pole.

    Paxton: You’re right. These guys are integrating. They really are. They’re working in an integrated world, which a lot of people need to get with the program. Look, not getting into politics and all that. At the end of the day, is it entertaining? Is it at all informative? Is there a moral to it? It is a weird time. It sure as hell is.

    Is there a moment when you guys realized you found your level together? You’re going to be in this for the long haul, presumably.

    Cornwell: I know the moment, for me. The exact moment. We were at the table reading. It was the first time I met you. We didn’t test. We didn’t do any camera reads. It was at the table read, and I had memorized this speech, it was from the audition. And so I gave it to you off book at the table read, and you kind of had memorized your response, and you gave it to me back. And we had a moment where we had another line we forgot to look at the page. We had connected. That was the moment for me. I was just like, “This is going to be fun.”

    Paxton: Yeah. We’ve become good friends from this experience, because it’s an intense experience. You either bond fiercely, or it’s like, “Just let me out of here!” He’s a first class guy. He really is. He comes prepared to work, he wants to do a good job, there’s no bullshit, actor bullshit. It’s, how do we make this better? That’s all I’m about man, at the end of the day. We want to make good work, and that’s it.

    Bill’s got some pretty classic movies of his own on his resume. Justin, did you have a thought or feeling about Bill in your head that you had to get over the first time you met him?

    Cornwell: I told him a lot on the pilot that it was a big honor to work with him. Every single day, working on the show was a big honor. But you have to understand, being the movie-head that I was and that my family is, it was like doing a job with your uncle or something you’ve been watching your whole life.

    Paxton: Very quickly, too, he could see. I struggled to get through my day as far as trying to get it right.

    Cornwell: Demystified himself!

    Paxton: Yeah, I completely demystified myself pretty quick. Some of these speeches are tough. You’re trying to find them and doing them. But one thing is that he got from me — and we never talked about this — is you see I never throw in the towel. I keep going. And he does too. It’s a hard schedule. Just getting your rest and being ready for the next day. Obviously, if you’re rubbery on the stuff, it’s going to be a hard day for you.

    Cornwell: It’s a fight. But those days, some days when you’re on, I’m on, it’s just a great day. Smooth day, we got rest the night before. I think that’s the hardest part is sleep.

    Bill, who was somebody that was an icon in your head that you worked with or encountered that was like, “Whoa!” And then you got to see what he or she was as a person?

    Most of them I never really got to see what they’re really like. Jack Nicholson was the guy that I boiled down from. Jack — and why he’s so entertaining to watch — was he doesn’t just portray the character, but he relishes the portrayal. And in that relish, you as the audience are kind of relishing it, too. I try to bring that relish to Frank.

    And Denzel of course. Nobody can shuck and jive and f*ck around [like him] — and I worked with Denzel on “2 Guns” a couple years ago. I do my biggest scene in the movie with Denzel my first day. I was ready. It was a movie part, so I had time to prepare the role. But again, this guy would throw stuff into the scene as we started improvising a little bit. And boy, he’s quick. He’s fast. His mind is agile.

    Do you remember the first time you saw the movie “Training Day”?

    Cornwell: Yes!

    Paxton: That’s, like, his second favorite film.

    Tell me how it hit you. I’ve seen a million movies, but that hit me like a freight train.

    Cornwell: I watched it with my family for the first time. Being movie people, my family is the kind of family that watches all the movies. It doesn’t matter what’s in the movie. We’ll sit down as a family and watch that movie. When we watched it as a movie, it was just like, “Oh my God, did not see that coming!” Denzel, to African Americans, to anybody really, is this heroic guy. He automatically becomes a hero when you put him on screen. It’s like, “Oh my God, there’s Denzel.”

    Paxton: I hear you.

    Cornwell: That’s what it is. So once he’s on the screen, “Yes, Denzel … What’s he doing? No!” That’s what it becomes. You felt like you were betrayed by everybody who made that movie. Then you had to watch it again. Then you realize that this is a masterpiece.

    They knew what they were doing when they cast Denzel. Not only was he a great actor, he was an actor that people had already loaded their preconceived conceptions of what he does and who he plays inside of him. So when he comes into this character, they see it’s Denzel, but they didn’t have to suspend disbelief, by the end of the movie, you forget it’s Denzel. It becomes Alonzo Harris.

    That’s the magic trick, to be in front of somebody and be somebody else. And Denzel can do that, even when he’s already Denzel. He already has so much weight on him, already an Oscar for “Glory” and all these other movies. He can still take it off and put it back on.

    “Training Day” airs Thursdays on CBS.

  • Top Rated Movies by Actor/Directors

    Orson Welles in Citizen KaneEgo manifests in strange ways, especially when fantasy is your profession. Some actors demand that no green M&Ms shall touch red M&Ms; some want a Thanksgiving-sized platter of gluten-free everything; others promise to explode should a lowly assistant dare to make eye contact.

    Sometimes, though, it takes a touch of that same ego to make an actor realize, “Hey, I bet I can work both sides of the camera.” And why not? With big-budget movie shoots lasting from a few months to more than a year, actors attend the most intensive film school possible — right on the set. It’s an education that has given us decades’ worth of movies good enough to make everyone jealous of the multifaceted talent on display.

    ‘Citizen Kane’ (1941)

    If there were lists like these 70 years ago, “Citizen Kane” would’ve been on them. If there are lists like this 70 years from now, “Citizen Kane” will be on them. Some clichés are clichés for a reason.

    And those reasons are plenty, in this case. “Kane” is a film school on the screen. In its less than two-hour run time, it establishes techniques — ranging from naturalistic, fast-talking dialogue to extreme close-ups and depth of field to rear projection — that would define the way movies were made for decades to come. And even if you’re not into filmmaking technicalities, the multi-perspective morality tale moves at a surprising clip for a 1940s movie.

    Actor-director Orson Welles did all of this when he was 25 years old. Meanwhile, today’s 25-year-old artists write songs about their butts.

    ‘Easy Rider’ (1969)

    Ever since “Citizen Kane,” it hasn’t really been a surprise when an actor takes up the camera with solid results. It is a surprise, though, when an actor-director makes a movie that captures the spirit of an entire generation and changes the way indie movies are made forever.

    But that’s just what Dennis Hopper did when he directed “Easy Rider.” Its freewheeling roots manifested not only in the movie’s themes, but in its point-and-shoot filmmaking style. Humbly putting himself in a thankless role and letting Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson take the cool-guy reins, Hopper acted like a cultural observer. And what he observed was the sex, drugs, music, and road-tripping adventure that defined the counterculture of the ’60s, even as the ’70s loomed with clouds shaped a whole lot like Nixon and Vietnam.

    ‘Unforgiven’ (1992)

    In a lot of ways, Rawhide” was his grade school; the creation of the spaghetti Western genre alongside Sergio Leone was his high school; the eventual direction of gritty classics like “The Outlaw Josey Wales” and “High Plains Drifter” were his college thesis papers.

    It makes sense, then, that Best Picture Oscar winner “Unforgiven” is a deconstruction of the whole Western genre — before you can tear something down, you’ve got to know it inside out. There’s no rootin’ tootin’ shootout in “Unforgiven,” no black hats or white hats. Every bullet makes an impact, death counts, and every hero and villain is just a shade of gray. “Unforgiven” doesn’t just deconstruct cowboy legends, it’s a legend all its own.

    ‘The Great Dictator’ (1940)

    If you want to prove the point that great themes and great movies are time-proof and trend-proof, look no further than Charlie Chaplin‘s “The Great Dictator.” This ageless political satire not only has heart, smarts, and funnies, it has major cajones — Chaplin released his Hitler-mocking masterpiece as German bombs were still falling on London.

    You know Chaplin best as a silent film star, but when he spoke, it counted. When he looked right at the camera lens and said, “The hate of men will pass, and dictators die,” even President Roosevelt took pause. And if it’s good enough for Roosevelt, it’s good enough for your movie night.

    ‘Reds’ (1981)

    Here’s one you can impress your intellectual friends with at parties. Years before the Technicolor bombast of “Dick Tracy,” director-star Warren Beatty brought his leftie-journalist-in-1917-Russia opus to the screen. “Reds,” which also brings Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson along for the ride, is everything you’d expect from a truly skilled director taking on a political period piece — a quick-witted screenplay, sumptuous cinematography, plentiful passion, and a whole lot of well-delivered idealism. Just so happens that skilled director is also the face on the poster.

    Sources

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  • Jared Leto Shares ‘Clever, Sweet’ Message From Past Jokers

    “Suicide Squad” star Jared Leto has some big shoes to fill as The Joker, and many fans are still skeptical that he’s up to the job. You may recall the Internet’s jokes and insults after the first image of Leto’s Joker was released, and there was even a video of Jack Nicholson crying to show his “reaction” to the new Joker.

    But Jared Leto just shared a more supportive fan reaction on Instagram. Here’s Jack Nicholson’s 1989 Joker giving Heath Ledger’s 2008 Joker a pep talk about the 2016 version:


    Jared praised the fan’s creative image, calling it “clever sweet + fun.”

    When Heath Ledger was cast as The Joker in “The Dark Knight,” plenty of fans questioned whether he could live up to Jack’s version from “Batman.” Heath showed there’s room for more than one take on the iconic villain, and he won a posthumous Oscar for the role. No one is suggesting Jared Leto will pick up an Academy Award for his 2016 Joker, but he does already have a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, so why NOT so serious?

    “Suicide Squad” director David Ayer is promising great things from Jared’s Joker, telling Empire Magazine, “The Joker is the third rail of comic book movies. There’s a power to that character, and by some freaking miracle, through the incredible things Jared has done and the photography and all the other millions of things that went into it, we’ve cooked up something transcendent. He’s scary.”

    “Suicide Squad” opens August 5, 2016.

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  • Jack Nicholson’s Reaction to Jared Leto’s Joker Is Pretty Much Perfect

    So, has Jack Nicholson seen Jared Leto‘s rendering of The Joker? Maybe. If he has, does he have a strong opinion about it? Probably. But it’s likely we’ll never hear it because Nicholson is a reclusive guy who rarely speaks to the press. Luckily for us, intrepid YouTuber Toniemcee has perfectly captured Nicholson’s would-be reaction to Leto’s tatted-up, “Suicide Squad” version of Batman’s most iconic villain. And it’s spot on.jared leto as the joker %Slideshow-203109%

  • Jack Nicholson Facts: 25 Things You Didn’t Know About the Iconic Actor

    Jack Nicholson at the 38th AFI Life Achievement Award Honoring Mike Nichols - ShowLet’s hope Jack Nicholson has a pleasant birthday on Wednesday, or at least a less disturbing one than the birthday when pal Hunter S. Thompson showed up outside his house, turned on a spotlight, blasted a recording of a pig being eaten alive by bears, fired several rounds from his 9mm pistol, and (when the terrified actor and his kids refused to open the door) left an elk’s heart on the doorstep.

    Nicholson turns 78 on April 22, and even though he hasn’t been in a movie for five years, he still looms large in our collective imaginations. Younger viewers know him from his flamboyant performances in “The Departed,” “The Bucket List,” “Something’s Gotta Give,” and “Anger Management,” but his older films remain ubiquitous on TV as well, including “As Good as It Gets,” “A Few Good Men,” “Batman,” “The Witches of Eastwick,” “Terms of Endearment,” “The Shining,” and “Chinatown.” A late bloomer, who appeared in 19 B-movies over 12 years before becoming a star at age 33, Nicholson has nonetheless spent most of his life as one of the most beloved and familiar actors alive.

    Still, as prominent as Nicholson has been, there’s a lot about him that remains little-known. (Like that Thompson anecdote.) Here, then, are 25 facts about his mysterious parentage, his early years toiling in Hollywood obscurity, and even his famous career highlights and relationships, that suggest you don’t really know Jack.

    1. Nicholson’s middle name is Joseph.

    2. His hometown is Neptune, N.J., near Asbury Park on the Jersey Shore, but he was born in Bellevue Hospital in New York City.

    3. The reason he was born 50 miles away from where his family lived is that they wanted to keep the circumstances of his birth a secret. His mother, June, was a teenage showgirl; his father was unknown, though musician Don Furcillo later claimed to be the father and that he had committed bigamy by marrying June, as he was already married at the time to another woman. To protect the Nicholson family’s reputation, June gave birth out of town, and her mother, Ethel, raised young Jack as her own. Nicholson grew up believing his grandmother to be his mother and his mother to be his sister.

    4. Nicholson didn’t learn the truth about his mother and grandmother until 1974, when he was 37 and already famous; the facts were dug up by a Time magazine reporter doing a profile on the actor. Both June and Ethel were already long since deceased.

    5. As a young man, Nicholson worked a number of odd jobs, including Jersey Shore lifeguard. After high school, he moved to Los Angeles, where he moved in with June, and supported himself in part with racetrack winnings.

    6. His first show business job was on the MGM lot as an assistant to animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, then best known for the Tom & Jerry cartoons. Noticing his sketching talents, the animators offered him a job in the art department. Had he not decided to become an actor, he might have spent the rest of his life drawing Tom & Jerry or Scooby-Doo.

    7. Nicholson made his film debut at 21 as the lead in the low-budget crime drama “The Cry-Baby Killer.” The film marked the beginning of his decade-plus affiliation with producer/director Roger Corman.

    8. Nicholson’s most famous early role was as the masochistic dental patient in Corman’s “Little Shop of Horrors” (1960).

    9. Nicholson, Bruce Dern, and Harry Dean Stanton became friends during the early 1960s when they were all struggling actors, finding work where they could in westerns or TV guest spots. Nicholson and his menacing grin were unlikely guests on not one but two episodes of “The Andy Griffith Show.”

    10. He was so fond of Stanton that he found a way to write his pal’s name or initials in nearly every film he made, whether it was a graffito on a wall or carved into a tree.

    11. In 1963, Nicholson turned to screenwriting with political thriller “Thunder Island.” He also scripted “Flight to Fury” (1966), in which he played a jewel thief struggling to stay alive after a jungle plane crash; “Ride in the Whirlwind” (1966), a western in which he played a cowboy mistaken for an outlaw; and “The Trip” (1967), starring pal Dern as a troubled man who tries LSD for the first time. After he became famous, he co-wrote and directed the college basketball drama “Drive, He Said” (1971).

    12. Nicholson collaborated with the Monkees. He wrote their 1968 film “Head,” a trippy collection of music-video vignettes. The director was Bob Rafelson, who’d later direct Nicholson in five movies, including “Five Easy Pieces,” “The King of Marvin Gardens,” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

    13. Rip Torn inadvertently gave Nicholson his big break. Torn was to play lawyer-turned-biker-dropout George Hanson in “Easy Rider,” but he got into a fight with director Dennis Hopper that nearly turned violent. Hopper fired him and cast Nicholson in what turned into the 33-year-old’s breakthrough part.

    14. Another breakthrough came in the movie “Five Easy Pieces,” with its famous scene where Nicholson tries to order toast from a by-the-book diner waitress who’ll only serve it to him as part of a chicken salad sandwich. (He tells her to hold the chicken salad “between your knees.”) Nicholson claimed that this really happened to him, at a Hollywood restaurant called Pupi’s, and that he told the film’s screenwriter, Carole Eastman, who wrote the incident into the script.

    15. In the early 1970s, Stanley Kubrick cast Nicholson as Napoleon in a biopic, but the plans for the film fell through. The director and actor would finally work together nearly a decade later in 1980’s “The Shining.”

    16. The actor’s first Oscar came for his role as rebellious mental patient Randle Patrick McMurphy in 1975’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” but he wasn’t the first or even second choice for the role. He got the part only after Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Burt Reynolds, and James Caan turned it down.

    17. Nicholson and Brando, who co-starred in the 1976 western “The Missouri Breaks,” were longtime neighbors on Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills. Brando used to stop by, ransack Nicholson’s fridge, and leave behind his underwear. After Brando died in 2004, Nicholson, as a gesture of respect, bought Brando’s decaying home and knocked it down.

    18. Nicholson was married only once, to actress Sandra Knight, from 1962-68. They had a daughter, Jennifer, born in 1963.

    19. He has at least three other children, two via his early-1990s relationship with actress Rebecca Broussard: Lorraine (born in 1990) and Raymond (1992). He also had a daughter, Honey, in 1981, by model Winnie Hollman. “Five Easy Pieces” co-star Susan Anspach has claimed Nicholson is the father of her son Caleb (born in 1970), but he has never publicly acknowledged paternity. Nicholson biographer Dennis McDougal claims that the actor finally forged a relationship with Caleb when he was a teenager and paid his way through college.

    20. Nicholson’s longest-term relationship was, of course, his 17-year romance with Anjelica Huston, who lived with him for most of that time. During those years, they appeared together in “Prizzi’s Honor” (directed by her father, John Huston), which proved her breakthrough role and earned her an Oscar. She left him in 1990 after he could no longer hide his affair with Broussard. Sean Penn coaxed Nicholson and Huston to work together once more in his 1995 film “The Crossing Guard.”

    21. The devilish lead role in “The Witches of Eastwick” was initially supposed to go to Bill Murray, but the comic actor dropped out. Huston, who was due to screen-test for one of the three female leads in the film, told the director that Nicholson was interested in playing Daryl Van Horne, and he was signed within hours. Huston then auditioned but the part she wanted ultimately went to Cher.

    22. Nicholson has directed three films: “Drive, He Said” (1971); “Goin’ South” (1978) a western in which he also starred as an outlaw; and “The Two Jakes” (1990), a sequel to 1974’s “Chinatown,” in which he reprised the role of private eye J.J. Gittes.

    23. Even though he played the villain in 1989’s “Batman,” he got top billing over Michael Keaton as the title character. He also made sure he got a percentage of the merchandising, meaning his role as the Joker netted him between $60 and $90 million.

    24. In a notorious 1994 road-rage incident, Nicholson infamously smashed up another driver’s Mercedes with a two-iron. The star’s golf instructor took pride, noting that, to do that kind of damage, “you have to have a near-perfect grip and a killer shoulder turn… and I taught those to Jack Nicholson.”

    25. With three acting Oscars on his shelf, Nicholson is tied with fellow three-time winners Walter Brennan, Ingrid Bergman, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Meryl Streep; the only actor ever to earn four was Katharine Hepburn. He’s been nominated 12 times, which ties him with Hepburn for nominations and puts him second only to Streep (19 so far).
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