Jack Nicholson

The messenger who didn't want to act

Jack Nicholson arrived in California in 1954 with no intention of stepping in front of the cameras. He worked sorting fan mail for the Tom and Jerry animators at MGM studios. But fate has its own rules, and he ended up signing up for acting classes to pass the time between shifts.

His real education happened in the trenches of B movies. During the 1960s, he made low-budget horror films and dusty westerns that almost nobody saw at the time. He wrote screenplays, such as the one for The Trip in 1967, while waiting for an opportunity that seemed never to come.

In 1969 everything fell apart.

The role of George Hanson in Easy Rider pulled him out of obscurity in a dramatic way. That performance as an alcoholic lawyer earned him his first Academy Award nomination and changed his standing in the industry forever. He was no longer just another supporting actor struggling to pay the rent.

Throughout the 1970s he took on projects that defined modern cinema. In 1974 he shot Chinatown under the direction of Roman Polanski and delivered one of the best performances of his career. A year later he won the Academy Award for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, playing a rebel in a psychiatric hospital.

The business behind the smile

Nicholson always knew that art and money had to go hand in hand to survive in Hollywood. When Tim Burton offered him the role of the Joker in The Batman in 1989, the actor demanded a share of the profits from the toys and T-shirts. **He pocketed $60 million at the time thanks to that masterful business move.**

It was a risky move that gave him the freedom to choose his projects from that point on. He shot A Few Good Men in 1992 for a fee of five million dollars for just ten days of filming. But his screen presence justified every cent the studio invested, because nobody screamed like he did.

And the gamble paid off.

In 1997 he won the Oscar again for As Good as It Gets. His role as a writer with obsessive-compulsive disorder struck a chord with audiences because it mixed meanness with an unexpected vulnerability. He won his third statuette and tied with the biggest names in the history of American cinema.

Retiring without an official announcement

His last major role came in 2006 with The Departed. Martin Scorsese let him improvise much of his scenes, and the result was an unpredictable gangster who was genuinely frightening in every shot. It was his final great masterclass in acting before he gradually stepped away from the spotlight.

In 2010 he appeared in the comedy What Women Want and has not set foot on a film set since. Rumors about his health have been constant in the press, but he has never officially confirmed anything. He prefers to watch Lakers games from his reserved front-row seat.

Money was never a problem.

His mansion on Mulholland Drive houses an art collection valued at more than $100 million. Jack Nicholson has twelve Oscar nominations and three wins spread across three different decades. His most recent known salary in film was $12 million.