The Great Acting Blog: “The Reason For Jack Nicholson’s Career Longevity”

The Great Acting Blog: “The Reason For Jack Nicholson’s Career Longevity”

Inevitably, Jack Nicholson’s retirement has created a deluge of responses in the press. One in The Observer piqued me in particular, especially a comment it made about him which I’ve pasted below: –

“the actor is not disappearing into his work so much as using his off-screen self to bolster the on-screen equivalent, and vice versa”

This is an interesting point because, if true, the implication is that much of Nicholson’s life was some kind of performance art. I had heard rumours that a lot of the wild man persona was deliberately exaggerated in order to create the myth of the man. I remember one occasion, when Nicholson was staying in London. He was snapped by the tabloids hanging out the window of his hotel room during the early hours of the morning, with a blonde on either side of him. The inference was obvious but apparently the whole episode had been staged, there had been no wild party. Also, Nicholson rarely gave interviews so that the public would never get to know him too well, protecting the myth so to speak. Of his party animal image, Nicholson himself said that it was “good for business”.

Perhaps this off-screen persona was a key ingredient for the longevity of his career. Why? Because effectively, his life becomes a 24/7 advert for his work. We would see all the stories in the press so that by the time one his films came out, The Witches Of Eastwick or Batman say, he was already on our radar and we were primed for his performance to come. In the 21st century, so called “audience building” is all the rage. It is said that an artist cannot be in touch with their fans only when they bring out a new piece of work, they must be in touch constantly (social media being the obvious recent example as a means of doing this) because this is the only way to keep them and add new ones in this age of content overabundance. This is what Nicholson has been doing for years by creating off-screen performances, using them to cultivate and grow his audience. This must part-explain his unusual feat of being so popular over such a long time period. Audience building? Heck, Jack Nicholson  was doing that schtick before they even had a name for it.