While his fellow peers, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, are still out there acting in films, Jack Nicholson, 88, has more or less decided to quit movies in favor of a more solemn life on Mulholland Drive, his home since 1975. Or so we thought.
It’s been 15 years since Nicholson appeared in a film, the last time being James L. Brooks’ “How Do You Know,” a romcom starring Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd and Owen Wilson. In 2017, he was attached to star in a remake of the German comedy “Toni Erdmann, but he has since dropped out, derailing the project in the process.
Brooks, a good friend of Nicholson’s, is now telling People that he doesn’t believe the actor has retired from acting, and that he might have at least one more film left in him:
Oh, I don’t think he stopped […] I mean, he’s gotten scripts, he’s reading them, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing him.
Nicholson never formally announced his retirement, but at 88, the odds of seeing him on screen again appear slim. Still, Brooks seems to suggest that a comeback shouldn’t be ruled out entirely. The only way I could see Nicholson wanting to come back is if an A-list filmmaker gives him a call.
In a September 2013 Vanity Fair article, Nicholson stated that he did not consider himself retired, merely that he was now less driven to “be out there anymore.” However, just this year, the actor did make a surprise cameo on the SNL 50 telecast.
Nicholson is a national treasure, and among the greatest American actors to emerge after the 1960s, I’d rank him alongside Pacino, De Niro, and Hackman. His charismatic, freewheeling acting style has often been imitated but never truly replicated — the sardonic drifter, the perpetual outsider, the man pushing back against societal structures.
His expansive and eclectic filmography is overflowing with standout performances: “Five Easy Pieces,” “Chinatown,” “The Last Detail,” “The Passenger,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “The Shining,” “Terms of Endearment,” “Prizzi’s Honor,” “Broadcast News,” “Batman,” “A Few Good Men,” “As Good As It Gets,” “The Pledge,” “About Schmidt,” “The Departed” … and that list could easily grow by another dozen roles. A legend.