The unofficial retirement of Jack Nicholson – where did Hollywood’s most charismatic star go?

Where’s Jack? This year marks the 50th anniversary of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), the 1930s LA-set crime thriller that has one of Jack Nicholson’s most famous performances, as sardonic detective Jake Gittes. It’s also nearly half a century since Nicholson played rebellious everyman RP McMurphy, who is incarcerated in a mental institution and engaged in a battle of wills with the sociopathic Nurse Ratched, in Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). Those two movies alone are cast-iron classics.

But despite such major anniversaries, Nicholson – now 87 – is nowhere to be seen. There was a time when the actor was spotted everywhere: in nightclubs, on chat shows, at basketball matches, at movie premieres. No more. The actor has performed a vanishing act. It is 14 years since his last movie, the rapidly forgotten romcom How Do You Know. One of his friends, music producer Lou Adler, told the WTF podcast that Nicholson now prefers to spend his time “sitting under a tree and reading a book”.

It’s arguably a deserved (if unofficial) retirement. Nicholson can justifiably claim to be the greatest, most charismatic and versatile of all the stars of his era. “He was the king and is still the king, really,” Oscar-winning producer Jeremy Thomas tells me. “He was the people’s king…”

Thomas, who worked with the actor on the 1996 Miami-set film noir Blood and Wine (co-starring Michael Caine), rates Nicholson as Hollywood’s most significant star since Clark Gable and describes him as a consummate professional.

“Underneath the exterior, he is a very serious man, a very serious actor who thinks about the part and works a lot on who he is going to be in the film … he’s a very likeable, believable screen actor and there is something special between him and the camera.”

Over the years, Nicholson’s life has been exhaustively raked over. He is the subject of multiple biographies, all telling essentially the same story about the wiseacre New Jersey kid from an Irish background who discovered in his thirties that the woman he always believed was his sister was, in fact, his mother; the former class clown who grew up in a family of women and never knew his father’s identity.

Nicholson was the bit part player in Roger Corman B-movies who suddenly exploded as a leading man after playing the drunken civil rights attorney in Easy Rider (1969). He then remained at the very top of the A-list for the next four decades.

Most actors have only one or two signature moments in their careers. Nicholson’s is full of them. For example, the image of him as the mad writer brandishing an axe and trying to batter down Shelley Duvall’s door in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) has become an internet meme. Nicholson getting his nose slit in Chinatown has likewise long since passed into movie lore. Meanwhile, diners having a hard time in restaurants still cite the famous scene in Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970) when his character is told no side orders of toast are available and so he asks for a chicken salad sandwich. He then tells the waitress to “hold” the butter, the mayonnaise, the lettuce and the chicken.

Over the years, Nicholson has been equally adept at playing blue-collar everyman types, sensitive outsiders, boorish braggarts, military martinets, criminals, cops, politicians, alcoholics, psychotic killers, and everything in between from the Joker to the US President. As Thomas puts it, “He is an incredible screen actor and his speciality is choosing the right thing to do.”

Those who worked with Nicholson generally speak highly of him. On The Shining, he would brush his teeth before each new scene on the grounds that it was unfair to his collaborators to breathe over them through “a face full of lamb cutlets”. When he was doing press in Cannes for The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), the steamy film noir in which he co-starred opposite Jessica Lange, he was spotted walking into his hotel early in the morning. The publicists were aghast.

“I was arriving at the Majestic Hotel one morning at 7.30am, in time for my morning staff meeting and I saw him walking back up the drive,” PR guru Dennis Davidson, who was organising the press junket, told me. “I thought, my God, he has been out all night and he has got breakfast with 20 Italian journalists, this is going to be a disaster, it’s a nightmare”. In fact, Nicholson turned up punctually and proceeded to charm the Italian reporters. He hadn’t been on an all night bender at all but was in the habit of going for an early morning stroll through the Old Town of Cannes. In one way, this is a trivial celebrity anecdote, but it underlines his professionalism and suggests that Nicholson was never quite the bad boy portrayed in the tabloid media at the time.

Matt Damon told a fascinating story about working with Nicholson on Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006). Nicholson played mob boss Francis Costello. One scene called for Costello to execute a man kneeling in the marshes. Damon recalled how the actor put his own, very sinister flourishes on the scene, upping and upping the ante. Instead of just a man kneeling in the marshes, Nicholson suggested a woman be there too. He asked for his henchman (played by Ray Winstone) to be included in the scene. He then asked for the camera to be left rolling and came up with extra details, small in themselves, but that added to the gruesome impact of the scene. For instance, it was Nicholson’s idea that his character should say, “Jeez, she fell funny.” This was a throwaway but deeply chilling line that showed just how inured the character had become to killing.

Nicholson was a writer as well as an actor. He co-scripted and co-produced the hit Monkees musical, Head (1968), with his friend and frequent collaborator, writer-director Bob Rafelson. He had a writer’s eye when it came to his own roles and was always on the lookout for ways to add extra depth and impact to his performances. (This also made him a consummate scene-stealer).

It would be stretching it to say that Nicholson is in the process of being forgotten. Most of his major movies remain in circulation. The extended cut of The Shining will be back on the big screen later this summer, as will The Passenger (1975), the cryptic Michelangelo Antonioni movie he ranks as one of his favourites. Tim Burton’s Batman (featuring his fantastically flamboyant turn as the Joker) is regularly revived – as are Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces and The Last Detail.

Nonetheless, Nicholson’s decision to live out his final years in Howard Hughes-like seclusion has meant falling out of public consciousness. There are no more of those paparazzi snaps of him getting up to mischief in nightclubs or cheering on the LA Lakers. It has been years since we last heard him flirting with Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour. (“Egotistical, whimsical and, despite his advancing years, sex on legs,” was how Murray characterised him after interviewing him in 1998 about his Oscar-winning romcom As Good as It Gets).

It’s as if Nicholson is the movie industry’s answer to one of those mafia bosses who goes off grid and hides out in his sandals in a remote Sicilian village - or that he is like the character he played in The Passenger, shedding his old identity and trying to become someone else.

“Jack is the biggest star I ever worked with, and one of the easiest,” insists Jeremy Thomas, who is still in touch with Nicholson. “And he’s so beloved. Everybody loves Jack. Everybody is happy when they see Jack at the game or they see him out and about. He was always available, always smiling. He wasn’t trying to run away like other film stars. He was there, a really cool guy… I talk in the past tense, but he’s very much in the present and enjoying life. He just has no desire to do any work…”