About Jack

For a movie star, Jack Nicholson keeps a fairly modest profile.

He doesn't do the talk-show circuit or grant many interviews to the press. If you see his face on a magazine, it's probably because the producers of his latest picture struck a publicity deal, not because he wants to sit in front of more cameras.

That may partly stem from the fact that the actor - one of only two male actors to win three Oscars - is so famous that he just doesn't have to bother shilling for the studios anymore. Or there may be another reason - one that stems from his desire to play a wide variety of roles, while needing to mine his psyche to bring life to everyone from the rebellious inmate of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" to the obsessive-compulsive romance writer in "As Good as It Gets."

"My secret craft - it's all autobiography," he told an interviewer in 1986, the period that produced hits as different as "Prizzi's Honor" and "Broadcast News."

Yet he's aware that his credibility as an actor depends on his ability to make viewers think he's a new person with every picture. "That's always a hard job for an actor," he said in an interview at the Cannes Film Festival this year. "Anyone can act once or twice." But when audiences start to associate you with an off-screen persona, "you have to unconvince them of who you are" to make the character live and breathe on its own.

After working with Nicholson in "About Schmidt," which opens today in limited release, director Alexander Payne says a key part of the actor's brilliance is his commitment to the role at hand, not triumphs he's had in the past or an image he's trying to build.

"Any vanity he seems to have comes from wanting to be most truthful to the character he's playing," Payne said at Cannes, where "About Schmidt" premièred amid talk that Nicholson could receive his 12th Academy Award nomination. Payne went on to give his impression of the actor's attitude: "I'm being Jack Nicholson inside this thing, my body, which is an instrument.... What is the most appropriate way for me to play this instrument for this character?"

But while he may not be vain in the traditional sense, Nicholson can strut his stuff with the best of them. Take his appearance at the New York Film Festival in September. First, he waved to the Lincoln Center crowd with his patented impish smile. Then he swaggered across the stage for an amazingly long time, still grinning. And then he explained why he was making such a generous display of himself.

"I just want to show you I'm still good-looking!" he called out to his applauding fans, without bothering to take the microphone. "Not like in the movie you're gonna see!"

His character in "About Schmidt" is a 60-something suburbanite with a sagging face, a drooping spirit, and a paunch that's getting bulgier by the day.

Not that Nicholson has ever been handsome in the matinee-idol tradition of Cary Grant or Tom Cruise. His eyes are a tad squinty. His hairline started receding decades ago. His eyebrows - those eyebrows! - look like they're modeled on the flying buttresses of some ancient French cathedral.

But that ordinary-guy look is what makes him so likable, and his ability to combine it with screen-grabbing charisma is what makes him unique.

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