The easy rider turned grandfather believes he's not as seductive as he was was -- but just by a degree. ‘I've been involved with women who have trampled all over me on the way to some goal that I could have handed to them. And I know that what they're after is not gonna produce why they're after it. You can't run your whole life just checking things off.' But he's always checked out the women:' It's all a matter of glands. Men's glands programme them to get up after sex and go right on to the next one. ‘At my age the body is older but the brain stays fresh if the curiosity is still there. I still want to know what's around the corner. Sex is my favourite subject and the sexual part of acting is the key. But sex isn't love. They shouldn't be confused.' He never appears that way but Nicholson seems to have been driven to prove himself again and again. In the pre-'Easy Rider' days of B and biker movies -- he had a decade long association with low-budget moviemaker Roger Corman -- he married the admired actress Sandra Knight. It lasted from 1961 to 1966. Their daughter Jennifer is now 32 and herself a mother. At school he had a knack for playing pool, the horses and basketball but his hopes for a hoop career faded when he realised he was never going to be any taller than 5ft 9ins. He took to the stage at college and then went West in 1954 where he got a job as an office boy in MGM's cartoon department.It fitted the class clown from Manasquan High School,New Jersey.He gave himself a decade to become a screen star: ‘It was a large projected pretension to think I could be a movie star. I didn't really know what the hell I was doing then. ‘Mostly at MGM I watched movie stars. I loved watching the women.I remember spending time lying on the grass, looking underneath a wagon, trying to see Lana Turner's legs.' Later, he did more than look but says:' I prefer the company of women, yes. The rest is all hearsay.' Whatever, he has been linked with a long list of ladies including Diane Keaton, Michelle Phillips, Margaret Trudeau, Cher, Susan Sarandon and Streep who he worked with in ‘Ironweed' and ‘Heartburn' in which he played an adulterer. ‘There's something autobiographical in a man who might do something as heinous as buy a woman a bracelet while his wife is pregnant. This might be grounds for execution in most people's minds but we wouldn't have many men left if the executions were carried out. ‘The rogue male is a character the audience just won't buy. You can have a mass murderer get away scot free but not some guy who is fooling around.' He certainly has. His seventeen year romance with Anjelica Huston-- her great film-making father John who died in 1987 was the father he never knew, ‘just the best guy' -- ended in universal upset in 1989. It happened after it was revealed Rebecca Broussard, 32, was pregnant with their first child Lorraine who is now six. ( Their son Raymond was born fourteen months later). It was a devastating time even for the man who in his teens was nicknamed The Great Seducer. |
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