Jack Nicholson

Jack Nicholson spent the sixties in low-budget pictures, a good number of them for Roger Corman, and was thirty-two before anything shifted. Easy Rider in 1969 did the shifting. He plays a drunk small-town lawyer who attaches himself to two bikers heading east, and he is in perhaps a third of the film. It brought a Best Supporting Actor nomination and made him the face of a new sort of American leading man - one who did not look remotely like a leading man.

The seventies run is close to unimprovable. Five Easy Pieces in 1970, The Last Detail in 1973, Chinatown in 1974 - three lead nominations in five years, none of them won - and then One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1975, which took Best Actor for him along with Best Picture, Director, Actress and Adapted Screenplay for the film. The characters are variations on one problem: a man who cannot make himself behave, and is entirely aware of it.

The Shining in 1980 produced the performance most widely imitated and no nomination whatsoever. Reds in 1981 got one; Terms of Endearment in 1983 won him a second Oscar, this time in supporting. Prizzi's Honor in 1985 and Ironweed in 1987 added two more. Then Batman in 1989, where the Joker was arguably the actual lead, and A Few Good Men in 1992, remembered chiefly for about ninety seconds of courtroom shouting. A third win followed for As Good as It Gets in 1997.

The then-and-now photographs are unkind in the obvious way and beside the point in every other. What the comparison across decades really shows is a performer who stopped needing to be liked somewhere around 1974 and never went back to it. A twelfth nomination came for About Schmidt in 2002. He played Frank Costello in The Departed in 2006 and made his last film, How Do You Know, in 2010. He has never formally announced a retirement. He simply stopped.