UR TV CAST

I was instantaneously aware of that.”"Do you know now who your father was?”"No, and I really hadn’t much curiosity about that.”"Would you rather not know?”"I suppose that would be the way to put it, since I haven’t really gone after it at all. I mean I’d love to meet two or three people now with the ability to keep that kind of thing to themselves and not blab it to every tabloid in the country It speaks well of my family’s character They took good care of me They wanted me. And I was raised in a household of women so I was not repressed by a dominant male figure They always encouraged me I was aware even then of the extra freedom I was allowed. They said we don’t really care what you do, just make sure that you don’t lie to us and that you tell us where you are.

And if I was anywhere they didn’t want me to be they let me know about it.”"You didn’t feel they had lied to you?”"No. Many people have asked me, isn’t there some resentment about the deceptiveness of women? – well, I didn’t need them to find that out. When you think about it, I’m sure it caused them a lot of problems and soul- searching.”"It makes me think of The Passenger – made only a year after you found out – and all about a man who, effectively, gives up his real life to be an actor in a story that has no script.”"I did The Passenger because of the director – Michelangelo Antonioni – and because of a kind of affinity with the material. I own The Passenger, you know.”"And control all screenings of it.”"Well, I look on it as a great work of art by Michelangelo, and the way the story is done in that movie is so germane for the period A reporter is creating the international image of a war He becomes exacerbated by the fact that he’s at a distance.

He decides to join this war, and he can’t find it! And then he stumbles into an identity and, as people often do in a real war, he doesn’t even know what side he’s on. You try to get that film made today, based on that synopsis, they’d look at you like you were from Mars. Then, it didn’t seem so strange…”And certainly I was attracted to it. It’s like an off-the-back-wall way of doing what I believe is philosophically correct anyway, which is – live in the moment, live in the immediate moment, there’s no `you’ over there. That’s where we’re all trying to get to.”"I know that The Shining is another film which means a great deal to you” – in large part because in Nicholson’s eyes it was so poorly reviewed – “Are there moments in that when you tried physically to resemble Stanley Kubrick?” I had always had the feeling that Jack Torrance, the character of the writer played by Nicholson in The Shining, might have been a veiled self-portrait of the reclusive director.”No, I couldn’t say I pursued that.

I always have some tangential physical image of what a character might look like, and with the character of Jack Torrance all I can remember is when he’s in the maze, thinking of Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. All that roaring and wandering.”"You like Jack Torrance, don’t you?”"Yeah,” the assent is nearly sighed, a sinking in, the most heartfelt word in the whole interview.The Conversation turned to Robert Towne and The Two Jakes. Nicholson and Towne had first met at an acting class in Los Angeles in the late Fifties and were close friends for nearly 30 years, a relationship that led to Towne writing The Last Detail and Chinatown. It had always been their plan to do three films about Jake Gittes and Los Angeles The second was to have been The Two Jakes. The film had been set to go in 1985, with Towne directing, and Nicholson and Robert Evans playing the title roles But then there were hesitations. Towne decided that Evans – a very old friend and producer on Chinatown – could not carry the part On the first day of shooting, everything fell apart.