Jack Nicholson Summer Festival: Here's Jack!

This year, EYE’s Summer Festival celebrates Jack Nicholson, the flamboyant actor with a devilishly charming grin. Nicholson is seen as one of the greatest actors of our time, who isn’t afraid to take on unpleasant roles where extremes collide: maniacal and melancholic, sinister and hilarious.

Special events
During July and August 2011, EYE will screen 30 of the 70 films in which Nicholson has acted, with special events such as an outdoor film screening, a talk show, a film quiz, and an evening dedicated to American director and producer Roger Corman, known as the ‘King of the B-movies’. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has been restored and can be seen in all its glory again starting on 23 June 2011.

Here’s Jack
Jack Nicholson was born in New York in 1937. Circumstances around his childhood were anything but easy: his mother became pregnant at 17 after an affair with a married man. Jack was raised by his grandparents, who let him believe that they were his parents, and his real mother pretended to be his sister. It was only in 1974 that Nicholson learned the truth from a journalist from Time magazine. His grandmother and mother had already died by that time.

From B-actor to Mr. Hollywood
Nicholson started out in the mail room of Hollywood’s MGM studio. From there he got his first roles in low-budget horror productions by Roger Corman such as The Little Shop Of Horrors (1960), in which he played a masochistic dental patient, and a bizarre LSD film called The Trip.

The anarchistic classic Easy Rider (1969) was Nicholson’s big breakthrough, during which the anti-authoritarian actor loosened up both on and off the set. Nicholson proved he was a great actor and not  just a countercultural icon with Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), in which he played the laconic private investigator J.J. Gittes, complete with a bandaged nose. His biggest role, according to many, was in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), in which he played a psychiatric patient who rebels against a dictatorial nurse after he’s locked up in a mental institution. Nicholson was awarded his first Oscar for this milestone in film history.

Diabolically macho
After this, the nature of his roles changed. He shifted from playing a defiant, stubborn man to the role of frustrated, failing father and middle-aged husband. In Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece The Shining (1980) and in Terms of Endearment (1983), he rebels against the obligations of marriage. In Heartburn (1986) he commits adultery while his wife (Meryl Streep) was pregnant. In The Witches of Eastwick (1987), he visibly enjoys himself as he makes a devilish argument for sexual abandon. Nicholson played the ultimate, egotistical macho devil here. He could simultaneously flaunt his masculinity and make fun of his image as a male chauvinist.

He reached the apotheosis of his diabolic roles when he played The Joker in Batman (1992). With his green face and frozen grimace, Nicholson let himself go in this role as a macabre clown: ‘You couldn’t go over the top with that part. There was no top,’ he remarked. And as a colonel in A Few Good Men (1992) he was sacrosanct. His one-liner ‘You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!’ from that film was listed in the American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest Movie Quotes, along with his ‘Here’s Johnny!’ from The Shining. He played a subtler role in Sean Penn’s The Crossing Guard (1995).

Ironic and absurd as per usual, he was cast as a psychotic president in the satire Mars Attacks! (1996). Nicholson garnered much praise as an obsessive, eccentric writer in the tragicomedy As Good As It Gets (1997).

Awards
Jack Nicholson has won three Oscar awards, and with twelve Oscar nominations, he is the most nominated actor in the history of the Academy Awards. Nicholson is ‘like a force of nature’, cameraman Nestor Almendros said. Nicholson himself says: ‘My secret craft – it’s all autobiography’.

Read the programme brochure below: