One of the grandstanders of Nicholson’s late-career phase, in which he is settling into paunchy disillusionment, rage, fear, loneliness and a kind of wrecked and desperately salvaged decency. Lange and Nicholson have a raunchy sex scene on the kitchen table, covered in flour, which the first film’s star, Lana Turner, condemned as “pornographic trash”. In David Mamet’s take on the classic James M Cain noir, tougher than the 1946 version, Nicholson’s sexy-threat image is cranked up as the drifter who has an obsessive affair with Jessica Lange, the young wife of an old gas-station owner – and agrees to kill him. “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!” Jack Nicholson’s ferocious Col Nathan Jessup erupts from the court-martial witness stand under questioning from the wide-eyed idealist Tom Cruise, pursuing the suspicion that Nicholson’s high-ranking officer directly sanctioned violence and abuse. A Few Good Men (1992)Ī Few Good Men, 1992. Heartburn (1986)Īlongside his saturnine reputation for thrillers, tragedies, dark sexiness and general atavistic threat, Nicholson has long had a parallel career as the reformable rake in romantic comedies – could he have a heart of gold, despite that mad-bad-and-dangerous-to-know image? Here, he plays opposite another alpha-plus star, Meryl Streep, in Nora Ephron’s autobiographical marital breakup comedy.

In Ride in the Whirlwind, he is a potent part of an outlaw trio.

In The Shooting, he is the disturbing, black-clad gunslinger who menacingly follows a woman and the two men she has hired to accompany her. Nicholson produced and starred in both and wrote Ride in the Whirlwind. Monte Hellman shot these microbudget western cult classics back to back in the Utah desert. The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind (1966) Then they are contracted to whack each other. Nicholson is super-cool as the mid-ranking wiseguy falling in love with a beautiful woman (Kathleen Turner). John Huston’s hitman-hitwoman black comedy caper, anticipating the Mr & Mrs Smith shenanigans of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie 20 years later, was considered a brilliantly irreverent satirical take on the mafia, almost The Sopranos of its day.

Troubled Waters by Susan May Warren