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Even though he’d already been a working actor for over a decade before Easy Rider was released, the myth of Jack Nicholson didn’t begin to form until the aftermath of the counterculture classic.
His first Academy Award-nominated performance put him on the map, and by the end of the decade, everyone knew exactly who he was. Nicholson was one of the most gifted performers of his generation who could play virtually every kind of role, and he was also one of the industry’s biggest hell-raisers.
A combination of powerhouse performances, that shit-eating grin, his penchant for wearing sunglasses indoors, and the drug, sex, and alcohol-fueled parties that became constant tabloid fodder refined the persona that would come to define his career, and he was pretty happy with it.
Whatever he was getting himself into away from the cameras, he could always be relied on to deliver the goods in front of them. Critically and commercially, there was nobody who could match Nicholson at the top of his game, and he gladly pulled out the receipts to back up his claim that he was unquestionably the single most successful actor in cinema history.
Once he reached the top, he never came down between Easy Rider and his retirement following 2012’s How Do You Know, and he was confident enough to stack his filmography up against anyone who’d ever graced the silver screen. With a few exceptions, of course.
As he was for many of the ‘New Hollywood’ era’s most influential figures, Roger Corman was a massive inspiration on a young Nicholson. They collaborated on several projects, but with the passage of time, the star admitted that rewatching The Cry Baby Killer, The Little Shop of Horrors, The Terror, and The Raven weren’t at the top of his to-do list.
“The first movies I made are so unbearable to me,” he told Vanity Fair. “Because all I can see is this young kid who’s trying to sort of dive sideways onto the screen, sort of hurl himself into a movie career, and that’s all I see is this kind of fearful, tremulous, naked, desperate ambition. Which is pathetic.”
Nicholson’s “pathetic” period also included the biker flick Hell’s Angels on Wheels, and his detour into psychedelic cinema through the likes of Psych-Out, The Trip, and Head, even though he was a writer on the last two. Funnily enough, that’s basically everything he was in before Easy Rider, underlining that it wasn’t until then that he felt he’d truly arrived.
The three-time Oscar winner and 12-time nominee was happy to celebrate his achievements and bandy around the evidence that proved him as the most reliable draw in the business, but still harboured a tinge of regret, bordering on shame, about his earliest forays into the medium.
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