Jack's Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson

Front Cover
W. W. Norton & Company, Jan 26, 1996 - Biography & Autobiography - 480 pages
No male American film star of the post-Brando era has demonstrated the talent, the charisma, the larger-than-life audacity, and the string of screen triumphs of Jack Nicholson. In Jack's Life, Patrick McGilligan, one of our finest film historians, has produced the definitive biography of this most private and public of stars, from his tangled Dickensian upbringing in New Jersey, his formative years as an actor and screenwriter, his near-accidental breakthrough to stardom in Easy Rider, and his string of great roles in Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Last Detail, The Shining, and other films that mark him as a searching, complex artist. Here as well is the often Rabelaisian life behind the smiling mask, the legendary romances and appetites for sex and drugs, the obsessions with money and control, and the perpetual restlessness.
 

Contents

PROLOGUE THE MOVING CIRCLE
17
BROKEN LINESAPRIL 22 1937
32
THE INNER MOTIVE FORCE195472
72
RUBBER STAMPS 1957
100
AFTERWORD
395
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
405
FILMOGRAPHY
431
INDEX
457
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About the author (1996)

Patrick McGilligan has edited the acclaimed Backstory series and written distinguished biographies of film figures including George Cukor, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, and, most recently, Orson Welles. He lives in Milwaukee.

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