The rumor that Jack Nicholson retired from acting has been a persistent one for almost ten years now, but we never really got a confirmation from the legend himself. There were rumors that he called it quits due to memory lapses and not being able to remember his lines on-set. His last appearance in a film was 2010’s James L. Brooks directed “How Do You Know.”
I reached out to a friend in California’s San Fernando Valley who has kept in touch with Nicholson over the last few years, he tells me the reason for Jack’s absence is that he is just tired of the industry as a whole; “seeing the drastic and turbulent changes that have occurred these last few years in Hollywood have turned Jack off completely. He’s done with the industry.“
Nicholson was set to make his cinematic return in an English-Language remake of Maren Ade’s German comedy “Toni Erdmann,” but eventually dropped out without giving any reason for the cold feet. In a September 2013 Vanity Fair article, Nicholson said that he did not consider himself retired, merely that he was now less driven to “be out there anymore”. Nicholson made a special appearance in 2015 as a presenter on SNL 40, the 40th anniversary special of Saturday Night Live.
Four years ago, The New York Post's Page Six had Nicholson's great pal, the late great Peter Fonda, quoted as saying: “I think he is basically retired. I don’t want to speak for him, but he has done a lot of work and he has done very well as a person financially. Sometimes people have a reason that you don’t know, and it’s not for me to ask. I don’t call him up and say, ‘Johnny,’ I call him Johnny Hop, ‘What are you doing?’ I would say, ‘How are you, how do you feel?’”
I’m an unabashed Nicholson fanatic. The man is a living legend and the all-around acting champ of maverick ’70s cinema (besting close runner-ups De Niro and Hoffman). His charismatic, loose style of method acting — in many of his movies he was the sardonic drifter, the eternal outsider, a man that always rebelled against a societal structure.
It's too difficult to choose one defining Nicholson performance, all of the following are great: "Easy Rider," "Five Easy Pieces," "The Last Detail," "Chinatown," The Passenger," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "The Shining," "Terms of Endearment," "Prizzi's Honor," "Batman," "A Few Good Men," "As Good As It Gets," "The Pledge," "About Schmidt" and "The Departed."