Do we like Jack Nicholson?
Our score: 5 out of 10. No campaigning against anyone and a fair few decades of work, but a settled road-rage case and a contested lawsuit, with little documented good beyond the films.
Jack Nicholson was born in Neptune, New Jersey, in 1937 and grew up on the Jersey Shore in Manasquan. He believed John and Ethel May Nicholson were his parents, and a 1974 TIME reporter revealed that the woman he thought was his sister was actually his mother. He moved to Los Angeles in 1954 and spent years on the fringe before Easy Rider got him his first Oscar nomination.
The Oscars then rolled in. Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Shining, Terms of Endearment and As Good As It Gets made him one of the screen's heavyweights, with three wins. As far as I could find, he hasn't made a film since 2010, and he has reportedly turned down more work, so there's no recent company to check him against.
The best-known stain is the 1994 road-rage incident. He walked up to a Mercedes stopped at a red light in North Hollywood, accused the driver of cutting him off, and bashed the roof and windscreen with a golf club. Misdemeanour assault and vandalism charges were filed, and a witness backed the driver's account. They were dropped after Nicholson apologised and the two reached an undisclosed settlement, reportedly including a $500,000 cheque. He later called it “a shameful incident in my life”.
There's also an old lawsuit. In 2000 a woman sued him in Los Angeles, alleging that in 1996 he invited her to his home, offered money for sex acts, then grabbed her by the hair and threw her out when she asked to be paid. She also sought to undo a settlement he had paid the year before. The reports I read carried no response from him and no outcome, so it stays an allegation.
On the harm check, nothing turned up. I found no remarks from him about trans people or gay people, nothing on vaccines or the climate, and no slide into grievance. In 2008 he went on a Los Angeles radio show and endorsed Hillary Clinton, praising her record on health care and her advocacy for women. That's a public act, and it doesn't show harm.
Nothing new on him lately. Reports say he has said he'd rather sit under a tree and read a book than do another film, and his friends describe him as doing whatever he wants. I couldn't verify any documented charity work from reliable sources, so the good-stuff column is mostly the films and the awards.