Word: nicholson
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This little object lesson in stomped hopes and lapsed memories must have appealed to Nicholson's sense of irony, and worked as well on his aggressive sense of pride. He enrolled in a beginner's acting course run by Actor Jeff Corey. Other pupils included James Coburn, Sally Kellerman, Producer Roger Corman, Writers Carol Eastman and Robert Towne. Nicholson and Towne (who was later to write the screenplays of The Last Detail and Chinatown) hit it off immediately and shared a small apartment on the hungry fringes of Hollywood. Both of them had crushes on every actress...
When not working in class, bolstering Kellerman, living the bachelor life with Towne, scuffling for the odd acting job in low-budget melodramas like The Little Shop of Horrors or TV shows like Divorce Court ("I was the most unabashed corespondent in town"), Nicholson found time to court Actress Sandra Knight. The couple got married in 1962. "We were very much in love, and I took the vows totally at ease," Nicholson says, confessing at the same time to a "secret inner pressure about monogamy." A year later, his only child Jennifer was born...
Sandra Knight surrendered her career to marriage, but Nicholson persisted in his. When a doubtful Corey admonished him to "show me some poetry," Jack's reply snapped back in a second: "Maybe, Jeff, you just don't see the poetry I'm showing...
...began to pick up more or less steady, but decidedly unglamorous work in such Roger Corman quickies as The Terror, starring Boris Karloff, and The Raven, in which Jack played Peter Lorre's son. The only real satisfaction Nicholson was to get from any of these films, besides a salary, was the chance to insert a little underhanded humor. He once had the smallest running part in The St. Valentine's Day Massacre-a chauffeur. Nicholson ad-libbed a single line of dialogue to steal a scene. While a hoodlum rubs some foreign substance on the ammunition, Nicholson...
Frustrated with his progress as an actor, Nicholson would periodically try other aspects of the business. He wrote a few scripts and co-produced two low-budget westerns, The Shooting, which he starred in, and Ride the Whirlwind, which he starred in and wrote as well. He also turned out to be a demon for efficiency and staying within budgets. When the movies were finished, he personally carried them to the Cannes Film Festival, searching for a distributor and trying to scratch up some contacts...