movies

Where’s Jack? This year marks the 50th anniversary of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), the 1930s LA-set crime thriller that has one of Jack Nicholson’s most famous performances, as sardonic detective Jake Gittes. It’s also nearly half a century since Nicholson played rebellious everyman RP McMurphy, who is incarcerated in a mental institution and engaged in a battle of wills with the sociopathic Nurse Ratched, in Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). Those two movies alone are cast-iron classics.

But despite such major anniversaries, Nicholson – now 87 – is nowhere to be seen. There was a time when the actor was spotted everywhere: in nightclubs, on chat shows, at basketball matches, at movie premieres. No more. The actor has performed a vanishing act. It is 14 years since his last movie, the rapidly forgotten romcom How Do You Know. One of his friends, music producer Lou Adler, told the WTF podcast that Nicholson now prefers to spend his time “sitting under a tree and reading a book”.