Jack's life

by Patrick McGilligan

"No male American film star of the post-Brando era - not Pacino, not De Niro, not Hoffman - 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 biographers, captures Nicholson's private, public, and cinematic life in all its complexity and contradictions - a portrait of the film icon as man and artist and hedonist and closet intellectual. It is as deep and intimate a biography of an American actor as we've had in many years, certain to be one of the most talked-about books of 1994." "That John J. Nicholson of Neptune, New Jersey, product of a tangled and bizarre parentage, should grow up to be Jack Nicholson, Hollywood legend, is a grand American success story - one that begins like Dickens and goes on like Mark Twain, with long stretches of a Fielding romp along the way. Here for the first time is a family tree with more false leads than Chinatown. Here