10 Of The Best Directors Jack Nicholson Has Worked With
Jack Nicholson has one of the most enviable résumés in Hollywood. After getting his start under the tutelage of B-movie legend Roger Corman, Nicholson became one of the biggest movie stars of the 1970s. Along with Ingrid Bergman, Walter Brennan, Daniel Day-Lewis, Frances McDormand, and Meryl Streep, Nicholson is one of the only actors with three Oscars. The only actor who ever won more was Katharine Hepburn, with four.
Nicholson is unofficially retired and hasn’t been in a movie for over a decade, because there are no more worlds left to conquer. Over a career of more than half a century, Jack Nicholson has worked with such legendary directors as Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby, and Stanley Kubrick.
10 Roger Corman
Nicholson first rose to prominence with early roles in Roger Corman-helmed B-movies like The Little Shop of Horrors. Nicknamed “The Pope of Pop Cinema,” Corman is a pioneering independent filmmaker whose business model continues to inspire the practices of low-budget cinema to this day.
Corman’s book, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, is a revered bible for indie filmmakers.
9 James L. Brooks
James L. Brooks is primarily known as a TV creator with credits on such iconic shows as Taxi, The Simpsons, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. But he’s also a renowned filmmaker, tapping into humanity through stories that deftly combine warm humor and heart-wrenching drama.
Nicholson played major roles in As Good as It Gets and Terms of Endearment and made a crucial cameo appearance as the anchorman in Broadcast News. Brooks directed Nicholson’s final film performance in How Do You Know.
8 Tim Burton
Tim Burton changed Hollywood forever with his hugely influential Batman movies. Nicholson gave a spot-on turn as the Joker in the original 1989 film, the one that proved the blockbuster potential of comic book movies.
As idiosyncratic as Burton’s Batman movies are, his original stories are an even better showcase of his unique visual style. Movies like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and Sweeney Todd take a sympathetic approach to characters who initially appear to be spooky monsters.
7 Alexander Payne
Alexander Payne directed one of Nicholson’s most understated and profound performances in the movie About Schmidt. Like many of Payne’s films, About Schmidt is framed as a character study – and Nicholson was Oscar-nominated for his turn.
Payne is a humanist filmmaker who has struck a poignant balance between comedy and drama and subtly satirized American culture in movies like Election, Sideways, The Descendants, and Nebraska.
6 Nancy Meyers
From The Parent Trap to What Women Want to The Holiday to It’s Complicated, Nancy Meyers has directed many fan-favorite comedies over the years. Meyers tends to tackle high-concept premises from the perspective of character.
She showed audiences a new side of Nicholson when she cast him as the sensitive romantic lead opposite Diane Keaton in her hit film Something’s Gotta Give.
5 Mike Nichols
With the double whammy of his debut feature Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and his sophomore effort The Graduate, Mike Nichols became one of the most acclaimed voices in filmmaking and a pioneer of the burgeoning New Hollywood movement.
Nicholson co-starred with Meryl Streep in Nichols’ movie Heartburn. Penned by the late, great Nora Ephron, Heartburn is a semi-autobiographical account of her marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein.
4 Miloš Forman
One of the early roles that made Nicholson a star was his iconic, inspiring turn as mental patient Randle McMurphy in Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. While Cuckoo’s Nest is a work of fiction, Forman is mainly known for directing biopics.
Forman has helmed Amadeus, a fictionalized biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; The People vs. Larry Flynt, about the rise and fall of pornographer Larry Flynt; and Man on the Moon, a fittingly unconventional biopic of alternative comedian Andy Kaufman.
3 Hal Ashby
Hal Ashby directed one of Nicholson’s most human performances in The Last Detail, about two sailors who give a young naval recruit the time of his life as a final hoorah as they escort him to a military prison.
Throughout his career, Ashby helmed many similarly acclaimed, delightfully subversive movies, like Harold and Maude, Shampoo, Coming Home, and Being There.
2 Martin Scorsese
Often called the greatest living filmmaker, Martin Scorsese has directed some of the best movies ever made. From Mean Streets to Taxi Driver to Raging Bull to Goodfellas, most of them feature Robert De Niro in a prominent role.
Nicholson appeared alongside Scorsese’s new go-to leading man, Leonardo DiCaprio, in the director’s uncharacteristically plot-driven crime thriller The Departed. DiCaprio plays an undercover cop in over his head and Nicholson plays the Whitey Bulger-inspired Boston mob boss whose syndicate he infiltrates.
1 Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick’s movies are more like monuments than movies. The reverence that cinephiles have for Kubrickian masterpieces like 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange parallels that of the game-changing cinema of Akira Kurosawa and Jean-Luc Godard.
Nicholson starred in one of Kubrick’s biggest mainstream hits: his wildly unfaithful but searingly scary adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining. While there are plenty of chills from the ghosts and blood-soaked hallucinations, the true terror of The Shining is Nicholson’s sinister performance as Jack Torrance.