He has been nominated for an Academy Award twelve times (winning 3 of them), more than any other male actor, and second only to Meryl Streep (who has 13 nominations and 2 wins) in total nominations. He is tied with Walter Brennan for most wins by a male actor, and second to Katharine Hepburn for most acting wins overall (Hepburn had 4).
He has also won seven Golden Globe Awards and he received a Kennedy Center Honors in 2001.
Jack Nicholson started his career as an actor, writer, and producer, working for and with Roger Corman. This included his screen debut in
The Cry Baby Killer (1958), where he played a juvenile delinquent who panics after shooting two other teenagers,
The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), in which he had a small role as a masochistic dental patient, and
The Terror (1963), co-starring then-wife Sandra Knight.
His work on the LSD-fueled screenplay for 1967's The Trip, which starred Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, led to his first big break in Easy Rider (1969). Nicholson played hard-drinking lawyer George Hanson, for which he received his first Oscar nomination.
A Best Actor nomination came the following year for his persona-defining role in Five Easy Pieces (1970), which includes his famous chicken salad dialogue about getting what you want. Also that year, he appeared in the movie adaptation of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever as Daisy Gamble (Barbra Streisand)'s stepbrother.
The 1989 Batman movie, where Nicholson played The Joker, was an international smash hit, and a lucrative percentage deal earned Nicholson about $50 million.
For his role as hotheaded Col. Nathan R. Jessep in A Few Good Men (1992), a dark movie about a murder in a US Marine Corps unit, he received yet another nomination by the Academy. This film contains Nicholson's "You can't handle the truth!" scene, which has since become widely known and imitated.
In the comedy Anger Management, he plays an aggressive therapist assigned to help overly pacifist Adam Sandler.
In 2003 in Something's Gotta Give as an aging playboy who falls for the mother (Diane Keaton) of his young girlfriend.
In late 2006, Nicholson marked his return to the "dark side" as Frank Costello, a sadistic Boston Irish Mob boss presiding over Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, in Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning The Departed, a remake of Andrew Lau's Infernal Affairs.
