Jack Nicholson

John Joseph "Jack" Nicholson (born April 22, 1937) is a highly successful American actor best known for portraying antagonistic, cynical, neurotic and aggressive characters.

Born in Neptune, New Jersey, Nicholson started his career as an actor with second rate horror movies by Roger Corman, including Little Shop of Horrors, upon which a successful musical was based. His screen debut was The Cry Baby Killer (1958), where he played a juvenile delinquent who panics after shooting two other teenagers. His breakthrough, however, came with a small supporting role in Easy Rider (1969), for which he received his first Oscar nomination. A Best Actor nomination came the following year for his persona-defining role in Five Easy Pieces (1970), which includes his famous "chicken salad" speech. Other early movies he is known for include Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), for which he received his first Oscar, and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Nicholson won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Terms of Endearment (1984).

The 1989 Batman, where Nicholson played the supervillain The Joker, was an international smash hit, and a lucrative percentage deal earned Nicholson about $50 million [1]. For his role as Col. Nathan R. Jessep in A Few Good Men (1992), a dark movie about a murder in a military unit, he received yet another nomination by the Academy, but he would get his next Oscar for his role as the neurotic lead in the romance As Good as it Gets (1997). In About Schmidt (2002), Nicholson portrayed a man who questions his own life after his retirement and the death of his wife. The deeply emotional, slow film stands in sharp contrast to many of his previous roles -- and to his most recent one in the comedy Anger Management, where he plays an aggressive therapist alongside Adam Sandler.