Woman: [ Laughs ] [ Humming ] Nicholson: Oh, [Censored] There it is.

There's the [Censored] nose!

Woman: The problem child.

You see that?

-Alien.

-Alien.

That's the nose.

Now, next, we're gonna take the hair off.

Oh, no.

No.

I'm just trying to get some glue off.

See this?

There's the [Censored] tooth.

No, Milton couldn't do nothing fast.

And now the extremely cool and urbane Mr.

Nicholson.

Thank you.

Narrator: Even without his makeup, Jack Nicholson was an exceptional character.

A man who stood out in the crowd.

An icon.

A legendary actor who won three Oscars and dozens of other awards.

A giant, but one that people simply call Jack.

The paradox of Jack is we know so much about him.

We feel so familiar, and yet at the same time, there are these sort of permanent mysteries about him.

As well as you know him, he's still mysterious.

Narrator: A mystery kept up by the actor himself.

He likes to keep us guessing.

Unpredictable and elusive.

Definitions tend to just slip off him.

What kind of man am I?

Narrator: Over a 50-year career and more than 60 films, including some masterpieces, he's been friendly or disturbing, seductive or terrifying.

But all of these roles, however different they were, had something in common.

Through them, Jack Nicholson revealed himself.

♪♪ ♪♪ Man: So, ten minutes.

Nicholson: 12:15.

We're recording.

Um, how divorced from you - Jack Nicholson, the person -- are you from your characters?

Basically, I think one of the nice things about being an actor is, is that you get to really explore something.

You know, you find something about yourself that you have in common with a character, and then you kind of dig at it and flop it out and throw it out.

Narrator: An intimate and personal exploration, straightforward for most actors, but which in Jack's case takes on a whole different dimension.

Cinema is a blank page upon which he tells his story and reveals his dark side.

♪♪ Entering Jack Nicholson's filmography is like going on a treasure hunt, where along the way, you lose yourself in the maze in "The Shining."

In his many faces, he shows us fragments of his identity.

This strange dialogue between Jack and his doubles began with his first film in 1958.

Reporter: There he is, folks.

The boy with the gun.

The crowd is going crazy!

The police can't hold them back!

Narrator: In the skin of Jimmy Wallace, he was already playing the person he was in reality, a young man of 21 years of age, not too comfortable in the skin he was in, suffocating in his provincial town.

♪♪ [ Crowd screaming ] Narrator: Spring Lake, New Jersey, a small town on a flat stretch of Atlantic coastline that still today exudes a quiet air of conformity and boredom.

It was in this world that Jack Nicholson grew up in a family of modest means.

In this photo taken in 1954 from his high school archives, he was 17.

A brilliant pupil who had skipped a grade.

But he has an awkward smile.

He was a shy, sensitive boy, and this part of Jack, really, I would say, still exists.

Meaning it's buried, buried, buried under the great movie star now.

But he was Catholic, and he had gone through the church, Holy Communion, and being an altar boy.

It's a kind of angelic boy, really.

But by the time he gets to high school, it's really not cool to be that kind of person.

♪♪ He started to be more of a, you know, to sort of have the facade of a delinquent and to get thrown out of classes and be kind of lippy with the teachers.

We were in the same class together.

Uh, you know, hung around with the same people.

He was a real big talker.

He was always disrupting the class with his trying to do some sort of an antic or teasing somebody, because he wanted to be liked, but he was very chubby, and that was one of his nicknames, Chubby.

He had a great smile.

It's like, "I'm Jack.

Like me."

He kind of forces the world to love him, and most of the world does.

Narrator: At a young age, Jack understood what was going to become the big motivator in his life -- pretending to be someone else.

He was already growing out of Spring Lake.

Epaminondas: In 1955, he got a job lifeguarding.

At the end of the season, he was out of work.

Nothing to do.

He borrowed some money from a friend of ours, got a car, and he drove himself out there.

♪♪ McGilligan: Most of the people in that high school were going to stay in that town or in that area forever, and they were going to inherit the lives of their parents in various ways.

And he wanted to make a break with New Jersey, and he went to Hollywood in California.

One day he's there, the next day he's not.

♪♪ Narrator: At 18 years old, Jack drove alone across the United States, fleeing the destiny that had been traced out before him.

♪♪ In Hollywood, he was just another young hip guy with no money, one among thousands.

But in secret, he was dreaming big.

He got a first job at MGM, you know, as a runner for the animation department.

That means you run with messages and you go get this, go get that, go get coffee.

You know, that was a great job because you could walk around the studio and see the films being made.

He loved it.

♪♪ Epaminondas: He wanted to get into the movies.

And then he said, "But I can never tell any of the guys back home that because they'd tease me to death," because no guys were going to go out to California to become movie stars.

It was the time of James Dean and Marlon Brando.

Narrator: Jack had to escape from the confined atmosphere and sarcasms of his hometown in order to try to reinvent himself.

But at the Hollywood Dream Factory, he was sorely lacking in star attributes.

Physically, Jack Nicholson didn't have the makings of a star.

His hairline started to recede very, very early.

He had a prominent pelvis and a heavy gait.

His physique was really too atypical, too imperfect for him to find a place in American movies at the end of the 1950s.

I think we'd better be going, Bob.

Why?

Your mother and father aren't going to worry about you now.

Not a week away from our wedding.

What's more, he had a voice he never really liked.

At the beginning, it was often held against him.

People said it was nasal, a bit Midwest, redneck.

They said, "Well, with that voice -- you have a New Jersey twang, your voice is too high -- you're not going to make it in the movies."

Narrator: In spite of everything, Jack became an actor, playing small role after small role in movies and on television.

It seemed as if he never quite fitted in.

There was something about his face that just wasn't quite right.

McGilligan: When Jack was sent out for parts, he would send out two kinds of photographs.

One was him looking very clean-cut, the boy next door, and then the other one, he'd be like, brooding, like, you know, the James Dean surly delinquent, neither of which he is, exactly.

It took him a while to figure out what he was, exactly, on the screen.

Interviewer: In those early films you did, did people cast you in one particular type?

No, they didn't.

At the time, I ardently wished that they did because it would have meant they knew who I was, no less what type I was.

Is this Dr.

Forbes' office?

Narrator: One filmmaker understood long before the others Jack's singularity, the B-movie director Roger Corman, the pope of pop cinema, offered him a small role that broke with the conventions of the time.

What made Jack special and different from the other young actors of the time was that he was a very intelligent, very sharp, and had a kind of a quirky sense of humor.

Oh, goody, goody, here it comes.

Aah!

[ Screaming ] Oh, my God, don't stop now!

Narrator: In the role of this masochistic patient, Jack got back to the clowning he used to do at school.

Doing that sort of thing, he was bound to go down well.

Jack was doing what he always does.

He was playing himself.

He was taking the written script, the dialogue, the character, and making that character himself.

Woman: His eyes glittering like those of a maniac.

Narrator: None of the three movies Jack made with Roger Corman gave him a really decisive role.

Breath harsh and rapid.

Aaah!

Shoots of just a few days with pathetically low budgets, but they were an opportunity for the young actor.

Corman gave him carte blanche and above all, didn't try to make him conform.

It was from this production company on the penniless outskirts of the American film industry that the future of movies was about to spring.

Corman: Starting in the late '50s and '60s, Hollywood was going through something of a change.

The major studios were losing some of their power.

The independents were coming up.

Thoret: Roger Corman was someone who had the intelligence to foster most of the coming '60s and '70s generation of talent.

Coppola, Scorsese, Monte Hellman, Jonathan Demme, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Jack Nicholson -- the list is immense.

Corman: We were all young.

We were friends.

We were true, certainly, signed competitors.

We were all part of a new movement in Hollywood.

Narrator: In this heady atmosphere, Jack began at last to flourish.

On Corman's shoots, he familiarized himself with the skills of the different professions that go into making a movie.

His horizons broadened.

His ambition, too.

We were both much more attracted to European filmmaking.

Then we used to go every time Kubrick had a film, every time Olmi, every time Godard or Truffaut or somebody had a film, we would just run to it, and we would just spend endless hours planning, to try to figure out how we were going to get to direct.

Nicholson was a cultivated guy who was interested in the nonsense of life, its absurdity, a great fan of Camus' "Myth of Sisyphus."

It was a time when European culture infused this new generation of American artists, and he said to himself, "Well, I'm going to start writing."

Narrator: The intelligence that he'd taken pains to cover up since his teenage years would at last come out in his writing.

His first screenplay in 1964 revealed a darker, more tormented side of his personality.

You know anything about death?

Death?

Yeah, you know, death.

Are you interested in death?

It's something that we all go through at least once.

He was a terrific writer, Jack.

Everything he touched, he was really good at.

And he didn't get credit for it because he was too interested in making serious films and not just commercial, mainstream stuff.

He was caught, like a lot of us were, between wanting to make films that worked for bigger audiences and wanting to try to find some more -- something more truthful.

♪♪ Narrator: For these new filmmakers, movies had to reflect the upheavals of the times they were living through.

As the USA got bogged down in the Vietnam War, American youth took to the streets in a climate of race riots, political defiance, and sexual revolution.

All of society's values were thrown into question.

Ready?

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

♪♪ Times were changing -- his roles, too, but Jack Nicholson still didn't have the right face for the job.

Alright.

Okay, that's alright.

I gotta -- I gotta take a break now.

I'm tired.

At the age of 31, he was already a bit old to be credible in the role of a young hippie.

It was starting to be ridiculous.

Jaglom: He had no intention of acting anymore, you know.

He said, "No, no, I'm giving this up.

I'm just going to direct.

I'm -- I can't go through this anymore."

Narrator: Even though he was a big fan of joints and hallucinogenic trips, Jack still didn't belong to the counterculture world.

To old D H. Lawrence.

Narrator: And it was precisely because he was out of sync with that world that he would be such a hit in 1969, against all expectations.

Ni-- Ni-- Ni-- Indians.

♪♪ Narrator: In theory, "Easy Rider" was just another B movie, but it revolutionized American cinema.

The heroes of this road movie were two guys from the margins of American society, confronted with conservative and racist middle America.

Jack didn't belong to either of these worlds, but in a tiny role with less than 15 minutes on the screen, he took the movie hostage.

The irony was that he was pulled into "Easy Rider" against his wishes, to act in that part, which he didn't want to act in, and that turned his whole career around.

Ah, we're in the establishment now, aren't we?

What'd you say?

I said [Babbles] What?

I said [Babbles] [ Imitates babbling ] Thoret: Playing the role of the alcoholic, he was the standout character, and he totally put Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in the shade because they hardly acted.

They were smoking joints during the shoot.

"Easy Rider" was quite an epic shoot, but Jack Nicholson is brilliant.

All we represent to them, man, is somebody who needs a haircut.

Oh, no.

What you represent to them is freedom.

Narrator: At 32 and for the first time in his career, Jack found himself in a role that truly matched who he was -- intelligent, original, and a little bit crazy.

Ni-- Ni-- Ni-- Swamp.

Interviewer: How did you respond to your character in the film?

Nicholson: Oh, I liked my character the minute that I read it.

Right away, I felt like he was a character sort of out of control internally, but had a very good view of the outside.

You know, so, he's a little wacky at times, but a lot in the character I could very easily get behind myself.

Like George Hanson, he's a loser in America.

He doesn't believe in the American dream.

And then, uh, throughout the entire rest of his career, almost without exception, he plays losers.

And he reflected a whole generation of people who were not like the people before and somehow very idiosyncratic, very much their own unique individual.

He was the right person at the right time.

♪♪ Announcer: Academy Award show.

Narrator: A gripping reflection of its time, "Easy Rider" instantly achieved cult status and thrust Jack Nicholson into the limelight.

Produced for a few hundred thousand dollars, the film made millions and would lead to a radical shake up in Hollywood.

All of a sudden, this generation of movie-makers, directors and so on were given the keys to Hollywood and told, "Look, we don't really know how all this works, but you're clearly onto something."

All you needed was to have long hair and smell of dope, and they gave you the money to make your movie.

After "Easy Rider," Jack knew he had struck gold.

He got his Oscar nomination, so there's no waiting time.

He's immediately a star, and he was all ready to be a star.

♪♪ Narrator: 15 years after his arrival in Los Angeles, the man who called himself a New Jersey hick reached the summit of Hollywood's Mount Olympus.

He went to live among the other stars on Mulholland Drive, ready to live the life.

♪♪ Jaglom: I remember Jack was excited.

He said, "I got a house right next to Brando."

He liked that idea.

I mean, Brando meant everything to our generation.

He was sort of an icon in our minds.

Narrator: But Jack let the chance to make a film with his idol pass him by.

The offers were coming thick and fast now, and he could afford to pick and choose.

You'd turn down both "The Godfather" and "The Sting."

Is that true?

Yes.

That's true.

"The Godfather" was going to be a good film.

I'd always wanted to work with Marlon, but I was asked to play the lead in it.

And A, I felt it should be an Italian person, and B, I didn't have any scenes with Marlon in the script I read, so that's why I turned that down.

And "The Sting," as I say, it was because the ones that I did at that period of time, I happened to like more.

Jack has always been very, very, uh, I'd say, um, determined about forging his own self-image.

He really began to define himself as a kind of outsider in Hollywood, even though he's the ultimate insider.

And he wanted to do characters that were on the cusp of what was acceptable in terms of language and sex, as a form of exploring himself and revealing himself to the public as much as he cares to.

Narrator: Now that he had the power to do what he wanted, he chose to play in arthouse films, such as Antonioni's "Profession: Reporter," intimate, even underground works that cut against his status as a star.

He exposed himself little by little by playing these roles that were made for him -- subversive, close to who he really was.

Woman: Did you miss me?

Ah, yes.

Yes, I have missed you.

Do you want to know why?

Yeah.

Because you're very simple-minded.

Screw you.

Narrator: In the film made by his friend Henry Jaglom, he got into the skin of Mitch, a sharp-tongued and world-weary Don Juan who resembled him like a brother.

The character is based on him.

Not just that he played it.

I wrote it with him in mind because he was Mitch, because he was a man who was extremely attractive to women, and he was not going to commit very much at that point in his life, and he was the opposite of whatever monogamous is, and dangerous because he would come and make a woman very excited and very happy, and then he'd leave.

Narrator: The ungainly kid of his early years now seemed a long way away.

Jack was a transformed man.

They now called him the great seducer.

His first and only marriage lasted just five years.

Now that he'd become irresistible, he became insatiable.

You're a real prick, you know that?

♪♪ Prick?

Interviewer: In "Carnal Knowledge," did you draw on your own experience with women?

Nicholson: Naturally.

I mean, naturally, I mean, I-I draw on my own experience with women in every part I play.

What is your own experience with women?

What's my own experience with women?

Well, I've had a lot of experience with them so far.

Pretty good so far.

Narrator: Not exactly modest, the great seducer.

But behind the carnivorous smile was hidden a much less glorious past.

Things hadn't always been easy between Jack and women.

His compulsive need to seduce sometimes seemed like revenge.

McGilligan: Jack arrives from New Jersey undoubtedly a virgin.

He did not arrive in Hollywood as the great seducer.

He arrived as a kid who had never had a serious relationship with a girl.

He also says in many interviews that he was bad at sex.

You know, he was a premature ejaculator.

♪♪ Later on, when he starts having girlfriends and starts going to therapy, and then he said, you know, "I thought when I was having girlfriends and when I was in bed with them, I was always in bed with my mom.

I was measuring them up to my mom."

Narrator: It would take years for Jack to overcome this cumbersome Oedipus complex.

Meanwhile, it was difficult to rival his mother.

Ethel May was a strong-willed woman.

She had raised her son on her own.

Jack's father, an alcoholic, disappeared immediately after he was born.

To make ends meet, she opened a hair salon on the ground floor of their house in Spring Lake.

♪♪ Epaminondas My mother used to go to his mother's salon for hairdressing.

I remember it being a big place with these big hairdryers.

Smelled a lot because it was permanent wave.

And if you ever smelled permanent wave, you remember it all your life.

♪ But her papa doesn't let you come in ♪ Epaminondas: I was sitting in the chair and Jack came out while she was doing the hair and wanted money to go to the movie.

She said, "Not now.

I'm busy.

I can't get you the money."

♪ I have been to many tropic ports ♪ ♪ I might include even Brooklyn ♪ Epaminondas: So, he goes into the other room and comes back out with her purse.

Now, he's being persistent, and that's Jack.

She gives him the money.

Jack smiles, his smile that he even had then, like to say, "See, that's how it's done."

♪ We'll take a trip and on a ship go sailing away ♪ Narrator: Jack spent his childhood in an exclusively feminine world between the customers in the hair salon, his mother, and his two elder sisters, Lorraine and June.

Epaminondas: Jack was a spoiled kid.

I mean, they fondled him.

They cradled him.

They pampered him.

They groomed his hair.

Pudgy little roly poly.

Powdered and perfumed Jack.

That's what he looked like.

He looked like he was just a pampered kid.

McGilligan: He was raised by these women who just fawned over him and whatever tantrums or transgressions he made as a boy, they were very quick to forgive.

He can be mischievous.

He can be very angry.

Whatever he does, um, he gets nothing back but love.

Narrator: Lacking paternal authority, Jack didn't know his limits.

This overprotected and tyrannical little boy was submerged by a deep rage that nothing could pacify.

You see this sign?

Jack drew deeply on this long-felt need and transposed his rage into his roles.

I am the [Censored] Shore Patrol, mother [Censored] I am the mother fucking Shore Patrol.

Give this man a beer.

His sister Lorraine, for her part, found it disturbing to see him up on the screen.

Is this an ultimatum or not?

Because if it is, I'm gonna tell you what you can do with your ultimatum!

I'm gonna tell you what you can do with it!

You can make this God damn bed!

That's what you can do with it!

Try cleaning up this filthy sheet!

That's what you can do with it!

[ Telephone rings ] Narrator: Movies offered him a way to exorcise his past, to make amends.

♪♪ Bobby Dupea, the hero of "Five Easy Pieces" who had fled his background and his family, attempted to make things up with his father.

Interviewer: Were there echoes of your relationship with your own father in that film?

Nicholson: That was a sort of very much an intimate, family-like experience.

But there -- it's essentially, interestingly enough, I feel, an anti-family movie.

I get very sad behind it, if you want to know the truth, when I think about it, because it causes a lot of illusion.

It gives people enormous emotional problems to deal with, you know, long into their younger adult life and maybe forever.

Narrator: To work his way out of his own suffering, Jack made a point of writing the reunion monologue himself, like a desire to reconcile himself with the father who had abandoned him.

I don't know what to say.

Tita suggested that we try to -- I don't know.

I think... I think that she feels that we've got some understanding to reach.

♪♪ With this role, Jack thought he'd settled his score with the past.

After five movies, nourished by some very personal wounds, the moment had come for him to turn the page.

The introspection was over.

It was genre film time.

You're a very nosy fella, kitty-cat, huh?

You know what happens to nosy fellows?

"Chinatown" was a homage to the private detective movies of the 1930s.

In appearance, nothing in common with Jack's life.

But only in appearance.

Jake Gittes' investigation confronted him with a dark family drama.

By an extraordinary coincidence, this piece of fiction echoed the cataclysm that was about to upturn the actor's own life.

In 1974, just after the film's release, a journalist unearthed a secret that was completely unknown to Jack.

♪♪ Jack's sister June was in reality his mother.

When he was born, she was a teenager.

She left school to become a music hall dancer.

♪♪ A bold and pretty girl, she fell pregnant when she was 16, probably unsure who the father was.

Unafraid of the scandal, Ethel May took things in hand.

She sent June to New York to have the baby, made it known that the baby was her own, and imposed a pact on her daughters never to reveal the truth.

This is in 1937.

It's a Catholic area of New Jersey, so it would be a tremendous shame and social burden to be a single mother out of wedlock.

Instead, they carried on this family charade.

However, he now knows that he has no idea who his father is and that his -- that June died without ever saying anything to him.

Why?

Ethel May died without saying anything to him.

Why?

I said I want the truth.

She's my sister.

She's my daughter.

My sister, my daughter.

I said I want the truth!

She's my sister and my daughter!

Narrator: The character played by Faye Dunaway bears an eerie resemblance to June, Jack's sister and mother.

By what incredible fluke did this movie script correspond with his own family history?

Escaping his control, reality contaminated fiction.

But unlike the character he played in the film, Jack got no answers to his questions.

Jack is floored.

He's floored.

There are stories that he hired private detectives, that he tried to figure out what actually happened, he tried to figure out who his father was.

Um, so it shook him.

And I think, being Jack, it probably still shakes him, you know, to his dying day.

And, you know, I think when you get to the next films, you see a guy, you know, kind of falling apart emotionally, psychologically, physically, in roles.

♪♪ Narrator: The exposure of this family lie liberated in Jack Nicholson something dark, a silent fury that would, little by little, start to dominate his roles.

And curiously, it was in a real psychiatric hospital that it started to come out.

[ Laughing ] Whoo-hoo-hoo!

♪♪ Pretending to be mad, the hero of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" wreaks havoc.

Playing this role was a great outlet for the actor.

♪♪ Immersed in a troupe where the actors were mixed with mentally ill people, he abandoned himself to what director Milos Forman asked of his actors, telling them to improvise.

Jack exceeded expectations.

He was on the set, just sitting around with Danny DeVito and others, improvising.

And every time they improvised it, going back and starting over again three or four times.

And each time, Nicholson, all his choices were appropriate -- they fit.

And in each take, they were different.

You know, it was like I was really witnessing somebody who knew what he was doing.

Alright, here's Tresh as the next batter.

Tresh looks in.

Koufax.

Koufax... Narrator: Calling on his own passion for baseball, Jack Nicholson invented there and then the commentary of an imaginary match.

It's a long fly ball to deep left center!

It's going, it's gone!

Narrator: On the set, he ended up identifying completely with this anarchist, stubborn rejection of authority, embodied here by the terrible Nurse Ratchet.

Would you like to rest today, or would you like to join the group?

Uh, oh, I'd love -- love to join the group, but I I'd like... I'm proud to join the group, Mildred.

[ Clears throat ] Narrator: At a certain point, no one could tell when the actor was being himself and when he was playing the role.

Man: I think they're both, uh, rebels.

You know, I feel from, you know, from his gut, You can't [Censored]with him.

So I can't imagine anybody else bringing that kind of life that he brought to it, and depth.

Lee Strasberg used to say to us, you know, if you need to work, you got to do the work.

But sometimes you just need to be there because what you are is the work.

That was Jack.

Alright.

Ready?

Action!

The best thing we can do is go on with our daily routine.

Alright?

No, Max!

Don't!

Narrator: With this scene, Jack took catharsis to its limit.

It was as if Nurse Ratchet was paying for all the women who had betrayed him.

Announcer: And the winner is... Jack Nicholson in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

[ Applause ] Narrator: He'd run the risk of exposing himself utterly on screen.

No holding back.

Now, Jack Nicholson picked up the big prize, his first Oscar in 1976, and from Hollywood, unanimous recognition.

Well, uh, I guess this proves there are as many nuts in the Academy as anywhere else.

[ Laughter, applause ] ♪♪ Narrator: "Easy Rider" had made him a star.

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" made him an icon -- the icon of the perfect rebel.

On the eve of his 40th birthday, Jack Nicholson had everything a man could wish for.

[ Telephone rings ] Hi, darling.

It's Toots.

Oh, they just want to know when I'm coming for dinner.

Anything's fine with me.

Okay, darling.

See you later.

Bye.

Um... Interviewer: Who's Toots?

Anjelica.

Narrator: Anjelica was Anjelica Huston, daughter of the director John Huston.

She met Jack in 1973 and caught herself Hollywood's most supercharged playboy.

She's a princess of the kingdom.

Jack is from the Jersey North Shore.

He understood immediately who she was and the lineage with her father, John Huston, and I think that flattered him.

Narrator: For Jack, John Huston represented much more than a great filmmaker.

He was a masculine role model, even a substitute father.

He shared his taste for cigars and beautiful women and an aversion for fidelity.

McGilligan: Jack continued to see other women.

Some were just one-night flings.

Some were famous people, some were waitresses.

Anjelica was very, very tolerant.

She had a worse role model in her father, and she understood guys that are tough to live with.

She was made for him.

They were perfect together.

Narrator: Jack Nicholson had found the ideal woman.

And yet... ♪♪ ...neither love nor fame were able to satisfy his gnawing need for something else.

He always needed more and then some.

The 1980s began as a decade of all the excesses.

Thoret: Jack Nicholson was a hedonist, a strange mix between someone who was chronically dissatisfied and a hedonist.

McGilligan: Jack has always believed in daytime and nighttime, in work time and playtime, which is parties, drugs, women.

He's always been very, very shrewd about understanding how that makes him happy and keeps him going.

♪♪ Thoret: There's a brat side to Jack Nicholson, because his leading impulsion is that he doesn't want to be how people say he should be.

And this dissatisfaction is very interesting because Nicholson always knows what he doesn't want.

But when it comes down to it, he has no idea what he does want, deep down.

Narrator: Testing the limits, always seeking to go further.

In this endless quest, the movies became the place where he metamorphosed.

This time, no question of being himself, still lesser pretending.

Jack was ready to slip into madness once and for all.

♪♪ ♪♪ That's the best approach to have, you know.

Never be satisfied, never get lazy.

Always be reaching out.

That's what an actor's about, trying something that you haven't tried before.

You know, the really tasty part of the craft is you can just be someone else.

And the more convincingly you are that other person, the better you've done your job.

Narrator: What better antidote to his own trauma than to become that other Jack, that wicked double who slides into insanity and attempts to assassinate his family?

Directed by Stanley Kubrick, Jack entered a new dimension on every level.

Thoret: "The Shining" was a pivotal film.

Working for Stanley Kubrick was a holy grail for practically all American actors.

He would dedicate a year and a half to this.

The shoot was extremely long, a huge number of takes.

Kubrick's perfectionism was insane.

Jaglom: He told me that Kubrick kept saying, "Do it again.

Do it again, do it again."

And Jack thought, well, he's going to modulate.

He's going to prove -- pick this take here and this take and that.

He picked all the top takes where he was most extreme.

And Jack was not thrilled with that at the time, but he gave it his all.

And Kubrick kept saying, "More, bigger, bigger."

Wendy: Please!

Stop swinging the bat.

Narrator: The actor didn't need a hundred takes to take things to extremes.

He was himself on the verge of losing it altogether.

Give me the bat.

During that 11-month shoot, he oscillated between exhausting days of work and nights of debauchery.

But at the end of his nighttime revels, he always arrived punctually on the set.

[ Laughing maniacally ] Jaglom: He got high a lot, but he didn't do it while he was working.

Excellent.

So, it was very under control for Jack.

He always knew how to cut it off before work, even cut it off before dinner.

Oh, my God, what have you got?

Yeah, right.

Come on, come on.

Narrator: The absolute terror that Jack Torrance inspires doubtless came as much from the Kubrick method as it did from the physical and mental state of an actor harassed from inside by his demons.

[ Wendy screaming ] ♪♪ Here's Johnny!

[ Screams ] Narrator: With this film, the actor smashed his image into little bits.

America's favorite anti-hero became its worst nightmare, and Jack Nicholson entered for good into movie legend.

Thoret: Nicholson's smile at that moment, stuck in the door, imprinted itself definitively on the collective imagination.

It would make him a comic book character and also a video game character, one who would inspire rock groups.

You could practically buy the T-shirt, and Nicholson became that thing.

The man with that smile, that grimace, the eyebrows that rise up.

He became a superhero version of himself, a superstar himself.

You'd go and see a Nicholson movie, like you'd go and see a Bruce Willis or a Stallone movie.

You'd go and see him doing his performance.

All that was left was a caricature, but in the strict sense of the word, all that was left was this frozen image of himself.

Narrator: Of that caricature, Jack Nicholson was very much the author.

Never taken in by himself, he pushed it to the limit.

Jack?

Jack is dead, my friend.

You can call me Joker.

And as you can see, I'm a lot happier.

Narrator: Yet another Jack, a baroque psychopath who was the logical climax of an escalation that had begun 15 years earlier in the asylum in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

[ Laughing ] Narrator: This iconic comic strip bad guy was only waiting for Nicholson to come to life.

His creator, Bob Kane, had himself colored the photo of the smile in "The Shining," disturbed by the obvious similarity.

Jack, as a boy, collected comics.

He loved comic books.

It gave him a chance to play a boyhood figure that still loomed in his imagination.

It gave him a chance to have tremendous fun as an actor, because one of the things we like about Jack are the roles in which he romps.

Boo!

[ Laughs ] Narrator: With "Batman," Jack Nicholson reached heights where the oxygen is thin and heads start to spin.

His financial pretensions were as excessive as his performance.

♪♪ McGilligan: Jack had a contract that said if this movie is incredibly, incredibly successful and we have endless number of sequels, Jack Nicholson gets something for that because he will have helped elevate the movie into a vent.

Jack, where are you going?

Daddy's going to make some art, darling.

[ Laughs ] ♪♪ Narrator: From the week of its release in 1989, the film was a hit on a scale never seen before, kicking off the Batman franchise around the world.

Jack pocketed the tidy sum of $60 million, unheard of at that time.

That role made him the best-paid actor in Hollywood.

Now his nickname was The Money.

McGilligan: And I'm sure he probably gave the term to himself, affectionately.

"I am The Money."

He asked for the biggest price in town because he's the biggest star, the biggest name with the most number of Oscar nominations whose name will bring people into theaters in a picture of that sort.

♪♪ Narrator: Triumphant at 50, Jack Nicholson had distanced all his rivals.

Adulated like a living god, he received more awards and honors than any other actor of his generation.

He had nothing left to prove, nothing left to hope for.

Although behind the mask of success, he hid in reality a secret frustration -- the bitterness of failure.

Thoret: One of Nicholson's greatest disappointments or wounds is that he thought he was a great actor, and this is what he became.

And he thought he was an important screenwriter, and he co-wrote some important screenplays, but he also let himself believe that he could direct.

But none of the films he directed were successful.

♪♪ Narrator: In 1991, Jack Nicholson tried to take advantage of his triumph in "Batman" to achieve a youthful ambition -- directing the sequel to "Chinatown."

"The Two Jakes" was the third film he directed in 20 years.

Like the two previous attempts, the movie was an abject failure.

I remember on the set of "The Two Jakes," he said something to me which killed me, actually.

He said, "If this one doesn't work, that's it."

I said, "What?

What are you talking about?

You're young.

What are you -- Why?"

He said, "What's the point?"

♪♪ Jaglom: I think he got trapped in stardom.

When you get huge commercial success on the other side by acting, and you can make a fortune, and it's easier to act than to direct, you figure, why put myself against this again and again?

I've always been a little sad for him that he didn't become the filmmaker that I think he could have been, a wonderful, significant filmmaker.

Narrator: It was the price to pay for the glory he dreamed of.

Jack had become the prisoner of a character called Nicholson.

For the two decades that followed, the actor took no more risks.

He was often great.

He was never really surprising.

You got something you wanna ask me?

As the years went by, he continued tirelessly to keep up the illusion of an always unpredictable Jack.

How about this?

Narrator: Always uncontrollable, always irresistible.

You certainly do.

Jack only scrambled out that trap of appearances at the last minute, thanks to Sean Penn.

He saw something of himself in this young actor who had got behind the camera, who had succeeded in doing what he'd failed to do.

And Jack let Penn use his own life as inspiration to write the screenplay that would finally free him from his own caricature.

♪♪ [ Door closes ] Like Freddie Gale, the hero of "The Crossing Guard," Jack had lost the love of his life out of weakness.

♪♪ For 17 years, Anjelica Huston put up with all the vices and infidelities of her infernal lover, even his sexual prowess revealed in the pages of Playboy in 1989 by one of his conquests.

♪♪ McGilligan: Eventually, he gets a young actress pregnant, and that became public in a very, I would say, humiliating way to Anjelica Huston.

And they had a very definite breakup.

I think the lack of committing to Anjelica is a little sadness in Jack's life that he would acknowledge.

And nobody was ever as close for as long, no female with Jack.

We had a good one, didn't we?

Yes.

Good times.

No hidden agendas.

None of the nasty bullshit you see with other people.

With "The Crossing Guard," the actor's life and fiction telescoped one more time.

It will be the last.

Jack Nicholson only let his nostalgia and his regrets filter through on the screen.

In public, he appeared happy with his new girlfriend, Rebecca Broussard, with whom he made a late bid to build a family life.

She smiled for this!

But the happiness was an illusion.

He was incapable of living in a couple.

Past master in the art of false pretenses, Jack Nicholson only gives to others the appearance they expect of him.

His legendary smile, his irremovable dark glasses, his image.

Jack always understood that wearing those glasses that bar you from, you know, looking into his soul, that particularly out in public, that's where the wall is.

Epaminondas: He made a statement about that.

He goes... ..."Without the sunglasses, I'm just an old, fat, bald man.

With the sunglasses... ...I'm Jack Nicholson."

Interviewer: I want to read a quote to you that a friend of your allegedly spoke about you.

"He's profoundly lonely, permanently alienated, absolutely brilliant.

And the natur of his brilliance confirms his isolation because it's the kin that's very hard to touch.

He forces himself to escape from himself."

Nicholson: You know, my recurring fantasy as an actor has always been that I would be drunk in the gutter somewhere by myself, disgraced for some reason.

You know, that's the ultimate fear.

And so in that way, I kee the ability to be alone, alive.

And I don't know if that's smart or wise or what, but I do know that it seems to be a part of my nature.

♪♪ Narrator: Nothing really distinguishes the actor from Jerry Black, the hero of "The Pledge."

Behind the mask, Jack Nicholson is a man alone.

Thoret: He's someone who finally understands after all of that, that there's nothing.

The desire is empty.

There's never a solution.

There's never an Eden.

There's never a Paradise.

In the end, the only solution is to leave or to disappear.

That's what the future held, the future of the Nicholson character.

♪♪ ♪♪ Narrator: Since his last film in 2010, Jack Nicholson has deserted the screen, preferring to keep the remainder of his life secret.

The last giant of Hollywood is putting the final touch on his legend.

All that remains is his image and the unfathomable mystery of his soul.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪