The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (303 page)

His career is itself a demonstration of nonconformity, unwilling to settle into pattern, quixotic and disenchanted at the same time, but always returning to the classical mystery of sensibility and instinct—the solitary trying to be one of the group, the detective with a broken puzzle in his hands. He also looks like the ebony around which oddball talents have clustered, a gentle entrepreneur who has already worked as actor, writer, and director.

At first he played in low-budget quickies and ambitious B pictures:
Cry-Baby Killer
(57, Jus Addis);
Too Soon to Love
(60, Richard Rush);
The Little Shop of Horrors
(60, Roger Corman);
Studs Lonigan
(60, Irving Lerner);
The Raven
(62, Corman);
The Terror
(62, Corman); and
The Broken Land
(62, John Bushelman). In 1963 he wrote the script for
Thunder Island
(63, Jack Leewood); and then in 1964 he acted in Monte Hellman’s
Back Door to Hell
and
Flight to Fury
. The two men had previously written a script that they were unable to place. Their association led to the momentous expedition to the Utah desert in 1965 to make, simultaneously,
The Shooting
(Hellman) and
Ride the Whirlwind
(Hellman). Nicholson was closest to Hellman in that uneasy but productive foray. He scripted and acted in
Ride the Whirlwind
and played the gunman, Billy Spear, in
The Shooting
. After that, he wrote the scripts for
The Trip
(67, Corman) and
Head
(68, Rafelson).

But as an actor he became increasingly popular, so that he was drawn into the edges of stardom:
Hell’s Angels on Wheels
(67, Rush);
Psych-Out
(68, Rush); then as the lawyer who takes to the road in
Easy Rider
(69, Dennis Hopper);
Five Easy Pieces;
largely cut from
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
(70, Vincente Minnelli);
Carnal Knowledge
(71, Mike Nichols);
A Safe Place
(71, Henry Jaglom); as the reserved, staid brother who only expands into fantasy on his late-night radio show in
The King of Marvin Gardens
(72, Rafelson);
The Last Detail
(74, Hal Ashby);
Chinatown
(74, Roman Polanski); and
The Passenger
(75, Michelangelo Antonioni).

He has also directed his first film—
Drive, He Said
(70)—a flawed, but personal study of escapees from the rigid environment of an athlete-oriented college. It is part of Nicholson’s wry charm that he could as easily have admired the only boxer at Yale.

The canonization of Nicholson’s
homme moyen sensuel
occurred with
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
(75, Milos Forman), one of those rare but happy occasions of serious, agonized meaning, superb entertainment, and money and glory for all involved. Without Nicholson the film might not have been made. His glamour did ease a difficult subject, and his willingness to act in an ensemble accounts for the startling “institutional” atmosphere. But it lies in Nicholson’s dangerous libertarianism that the film goes from comedy to tragedy, and it is to his credit that millions felt the dignity of MacMurphy’s slapdash, subversive vitality. With an indisputable Oscar to his name, he was a proper rival for, but a little awed by, Brando in
The Missouri Breaks
(76, Arthur Penn); then he filled out the sketch of Brimmer in
The Last Tycoon
(76, Elia Kazan).

His near two-year absence from the screen was explained by the problems of mounting a movie that he wanted to direct himself, a picaresque Western titled
Goin’ South
(78).

The story goes on: around the time the last edition of this book appeared, it was revealed that the woman Nicholson had grown up thinking of as his sister was actually his mother. To this day, the full truth remains unclear. But Nicholson is the Hollywood celebrity who is most like a character in some ongoing novel of our times. He is also the most beloved of stars—not even his huge wealth, his reckless aging, and the public disasters of his private life can detract from this. Nicholson actually appeared on the cover of
Vanity Fair
holding two babies—purportedly his. Yet inside, the small print admitted these babies were models! Actors! And he lost not a prosciutto slice of public affection. When it was time for the presentation of best picture at the 1993 Oscars, Billy Crystal had only to say, “Jack,” and everyone knew who was coming. It must be a huge strain being “Jack,” and there are signs of dismay, indirection, and doubt, as well as age. His acting fluctuates, as if he was bored sometimes, or simply wanted to see what he could get away with. The huge impact of
Batman
makes it easier to see the ways in which Nicholson is becoming more like a cartoon.

The Shining
(80, Stanley Kubrick) was one of his great films—the wicked naughty boy, the thwarted genius, the monster of his own loneliness. No one else could have been so daring and yet so delicate. In
The Postman Always Rings Twice
(81, Rafelson), he was less tested, but he had a look of the 1930s and a chronic deadbeat while never losing touch with the common beast whose eyes might widen at thoughts of money, murder, and great sex.

He was nominated for the supporting actor Oscar for his remote but romantic Eugene O’Neill in
Reds
(81, Warren Beatty). He slouched and muttered his way back and forth across
The Border
(82, Tony Richardson). Effortlessly he won the supporting actor Oscar in
Terms of Endearment
(83, James L. Brooks). He was suitably heavy, dogged, and humorless as the respectable killer in
Prizzi’s Honor
(85, John Huston), yet there’s reason to think he didn’t quite get the tone or drift of that odd, slow comedy.
Heartburn
(86, Nichols) was a misfire.

In
The Witches of Eastwick
(87, George Miller), he was self-indulgent as his own horny little devil, but very funny and richly entertaining. In hindsight, it seems like a significant excursion into fantasy. He appeared briefly in
Broadcast News
(87, Brooks) and could not help looking overfed as the street bum in
Ironweed
(87, Hector Babenco). He acted very well in the film, but he was miscast.

As for
Batman
(89, Tim Burton), one can only say that his flashy Joker pulled down at least $50 million in pay, profits, and merchandising deals. Jack Torrance would have howled at the moon.

In 1985, he had been about to reprise Jake Gittes for writer-director Robert Towne in
The Two Jakes
, the long-awaited
Chinatown
sequel. The venture collapsed. Then in 1990, it was really made, with Nicholson directing. The picture was a disaster; the old friendship with Towne seemed over. Decades of hope were disappointed.

Man Trouble
(91) reunited Nicholson with Rafelson and screenwriter Carole Eastman (who had done
Five Easy Pieces
). But it was a witless, draggy film that seemed to show how time had passed on, leaving some people stranded. This was a low point, coupled with Nicholson’s regular and hardly flattering appearances in gossip columns.

But he bounced back. His marine colonel in
A Few Good Men
(92, Rob Reiner) was hardly plausible—indeed, he was rigged to explode for the purposes of melodrama—but Nicholson blazed and roared, and looked in great shape. He even got a supporting actor nomination. Far better was the terribly neglected
Hoffa
(92, Danny DeVito), one of his best things—snarly, dumb, smart, noble, rascally—all the parts of “Jack.”

In 1994, he appeared in
Wolf
(Nichols) and acted beautifully until asked to grow hair and fangs.

As time went on, Nicholson worked for old friends, or people he trusted. The results were mixed, and Nicholson has expressed his dismay at the state of modern film. Also, his own innate fun has rather clouded over. He seems sadder with life, and that hurts us all, I think. For he is still a touchstone, someone we value for the way he helps us see ourselves:
The Crossing Guard
(95, Sean Penn);
Blood and Wine
(97, Rafelson);
Mars Attacks!
(96, Burton); briefly in
The Evening Star
(96, Robert Harling); winning another Oscar, his third, in
As Good As It Gets
(97, Brooks);
The Pledge
(00, Penn);
About Schmidt
(02, Alexander Payne); with Adam Sandler in
Anger Management
(03, Peter Segal); then lovely, untamed, and in love with Diane Keaton in
Something’s Gotta Give
(03, Nancy Meyers), a big crowd-pleaser in a gloomy season.

For
The Departed
(06), he moved to Boston and the world of Martin Scorsese, and delivered a gloating monster—marinaded in sex and drugs—but not quite sure whether he was wicked or comic.
The Bucket List
(07, Reiner), with Morgan Freeman, was an undisguised exercise in geezer cinema. It may need a fierce director to bring Jack back to ground—
How Do You Know
(10, Brooks)?

Asta Nielsen
(1883–1972), b. Vesterbro, Denmark
The first great actress of the German cinema, and arguably the most animated and beautiful, Asta Nielsen retired with sound, and made only one further film. But far from a casualty of technology, she was already middle-aged. Although she was a leading actress throughout the 1920s, her greatest impact had been in the decade before that when she arrived in Germany with a spontaneity exceeding any native talent. Had she been born ten years later, she would have lasted well into the sound period. As it is, her work is not well known—not much has survived, and her reputation is clouded with factual errors, such as the suggestion (noted in
The Times’
obituary) that she played in Pabst’s
Die Buchse der Pandora
. In fact, she played Lulu in an earlier version, directed in 1922 by Arsen von Czerepy. Lotte Eisner has said that “People nowadays cannot understand what that pale mask, with its immense blazing eyes, meant for the nineteen-tens and twenties.… A hypercultivated, unstable, sophisticated period had found its ideal, an intellectual of great refinement.… Asta Nielsen was more than what a generation cultivating the linear and the arabesque was in search of. It was impossible to put a label on this great actress: she was neither ‘modernistic’ nor ‘Expressionistic.’ Her warm humanity, full of the breath of life and presence, refuted both abstraction and the abruptness of Expressionist art.” The few films available, and a range of stills, suggest that by the standards of her time—which are those of Theda Bara—she was exceptionally unmannered. The variety of her work indicates a full-blooded artistic ambition.

She was discovered on the Danish stage by August Blom who directed her in
Ved Faengslets Port
(10),
Livets Storme
(11), and
Ballet Danserinden
(11). Then she married the director Urban Gad who directed her in
Afgrunden
(10). He took her to Germany and directed her next thirty films, until 1914:
Der Fremde Vogel
(11);
Der Schwarze Traum
(11);
Die Arme Jenny
(12);
Das Madchen ohne Vaterland
(12);
Der Totentanz
(12);
Engelein
(13);
Die Filmprimadonna
(13);
Die Suffragetten
(13);
Der Tod in Sevilla
(13);
Elena Fontana
(14);
Die Ewige Nacht
(14);
Das Feuer
(14);
Die Tochter der Landstrasse
(14); and
Zapatas Bande
(14).

That remarkable continuity could only be broken by divorce. From 1916 onward, she worked with a much wider range of directors:
Das Liebes-ABC
(16, Magnus Shifter);
Das Eskimo-Baby
(17, Walter Schmidthassler);
Die Rose der Wildnis
(17, Schmidthassler);
Der Fackeltrager
(18, Holger Madsen);
Das Ende vom Lied
(19, Willy Grundwald); and
Rausch
(19, Ernst Lubitsch). With her second husband, Danish director Svend Gade, she formed a company specially to film
Hamlet
(20), playing the prince herself. Then
Kurfursten-damm
(20, Richard Oswald);
Der Reigen
(20, Oswald);
Die Spielerin
(20, Oswald);
Die Geliebte Roswolskys
(21, Felix Basch);
Irrende Seelen
(21, Carl Froelich); as Mata Hari in
Die Spionin
(21, Paul Ludwig Wolff); as Strindberg’s
Fraulein Julie
(22, Basch);
Vanina oder die Galgenhochzeit
(22, Arthur von Gerlach);
Erdgeist
(23, Leopold Jessner);
I.N.R.I
. (23, Robert Wiene);
Die Frau im Feuer
(24, Carl Boese);
Hedda Gabler
(24, Fritz Eckstein);
Lebende Buddhas
(24, Paul Wegener);
Die Freudlose Gasse
(25, G. W. Pabst);
Dirnen-tragodie
(27, Rahn);
Gehetzte Frauen
(27, Oswald);
Kleinstadtsunden
(27, Rahn);
Laster der Menscheit
(27, Rudolph Meinert); only one sound film,
Unmogliche Liebe
(32, Erich Waschnech).

Bill
(William Francis)
Nighy
, b. Caterham, Surrey, England, 1949
Somewhere between a scarecrow and a faded aristocrat, Bill Nighy is without equal on the current British scene as a sample of wreckage from a dysfunctional class structure. With very small adjustments in his cracking voice and the way he combs his retreating hair, he can shift from a twice-convicted confidence trickster to a peer of the realm. That realm has more to do with
Wind in the Willows
than wordplay in Westminster. But he has not gone unnoticed—several intrigued writers and directors have seen Nighy, recognized his composed confusion, and sought to create roles for him.