The unofficial retirement of Jack Nicholson – where did Hollywood’s most charismatic star go?

Jack Nicholson’s performances in ‘Chinatown’ and ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ are cast-iron classics. Fast-forward half a century later, and the actor has performed a vanishing act. Geoffrey Macnab asks: where is he now?

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 (Getty)

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”.

It’s arguably a deserved (if unofficial) retirement. Nicholson can justifiably claim to be the greatest, most charismatic and versatile of all the stars of his era. “He was the king and is still the king, really,” Oscar-winning producer Jeremy Thomas tells me. “He was the people’s king…”