Jack Nicholson

Biography

After four full decades of film-making, three of them spent at the very top of his profession, Jack Nicholson is arguably the most famous actor alive. As far back as 1983, at that year's Oscar ceremony, host Billy Crystal announced the presenter of the Best Picture award. He just said one word - Jack - and an audience of billions knew exactly who was about to stroll onstage. He's a writer, a director and a producer. By 2002, he'd been Oscar-nominated on eleven separate occasions. He's been romantically linked to many of Hollywood's most beautiful actresses. He's even had a book written about his taste in food - Cooking For Jack. Again, which other Jack could they possibly mean?

Nicholson's upbringing was strange - he would not discover HOW strange till he was well into his thirties. He was born on the 22nd of April, 1937, in St Vincent's Hospital, New York City (though there is apparently no record of his birth anywhere), then his mother took him back to her hometown of Neptune, New Jersey, where he was raised by his grandmother, always believing that his own mother was his older sister. He remained unaware of the situation till informed in 1974 by a journalist who'd been researching a feature on him. The details remain sketchy as, by that time, both his mother and grandmother were dead, both having taken their secret to the grave, and Nicholson subsequently had next-to-no contact with his real father. But this is the generally accepted truth.