For a star, Jack Nicholson has some surprisingly un-starlike qualities. He will take a minor role as soon as a starring one, merely for the challenge; he won't ask the salary he is worth if he knows the picture is of limited appeal; he will take parts out of a desire to work with a specific director or as a favour to a friend; and he dislikes publicity. Yet, it is just this sort of non-conformity that has made each of his performances to date so appealing

No-one would dispute Jack Nicholson's right to stardom. He has three Oscars, the reputation for being hard to reach and is reluctant to give interviews - no matter that he might be bumped into at a neighbourhood restaurant or basketball game. As a box-office personality he has had several big hits that have pushed his salary very close to the top level.

Yet the casual, low-down mood of B pictures still hangs over him. He can be unshaven, shabby or downright unwholesome on screen - and he never comes near the monolithhhic glamour of Robert Redford or Clint Eastwood - but he is a most droll sexual rascal, as knowing as he is familiar and as likely to eat up a woman as he could the camera. As a movie lover he goes all the way in terms of emotional commitment. He knows how absurd love is, but nothing deters him from its compulsion. Nicholson has never been tied down by the anxious self-esteem that limits Burt Reynolds. He is a very relaxed person and a truly romantic actor, always in search of extremes: death or ecstasy - the twin destinies of the B picture.

Other results of his low-budget background are that he believes in some pictures more than others: that he is rarely content to be a bankable star; and that the allegiances he formed in the Sixties still affect his choices of work. It is very difficult to think of a Nicholson film from the Seventies that is impersonal and unadventurous, and easy exploitation of his stardom doesn't move him much. He wants to shape his projects and be more deeply involved in things than is the case with most actors, and the path he has taken is an example of how often the B-picture revival of the late Sixties was a breeding ground for people who were not just drug - or bike-crazy, but mad about movies too.

Born in New Jersey in 1937, Jack Nicholson had a difficult early life. His father was an alcoholic who left home before Jack was born. He was raised believing his grandmother was his mother and his mother was his older sister. The truth was revealed to him years later when a Time magazine researcher uncovered the truth while preparing a story on the star.

Never happy or occupied in high school, he drifted to Los Angeles in the late Fifties, one of the many who fancied being the next James Dean. He found a job in the cartoons department at MGM and took classes at the Jeff Corey acting school.

Sex and drugs and . . .

Over the next ten years Nicholson knocked around Hollywood, experimented with his life and did more hustling than most of his contemporaries. He married actress Sandra Knight, had a daughter and divorced. He played around with motorbikes and drugs, and as far as work was concerned he was ready for whatever the low-budget director,b> Roger Corman - or anyone else - could toss his way. His movies during this period included The Cry- Baby Killer (1958), Too Soon to Love, The Little Shop of Horrors, Studs Lonigan (all 1960), The Trip, Hell's Angels on Wheels (both 1967) and Psych-Out (1968).

The last two were directed by Richard Rush, who has finally received belated recognition for the stylish, camp existentialism of The Stunt Man (1980). Nicholson's work with Rush is a testament to his habit of working with odd, interesting people. Time and again he has found a special creative rapport with directors, and in the Sixties he managed this with both Monte Hellman and Bob Rafelson.

The ones that got away

Nicholson went to the Philippines with Hellman to make two back-to-back quickies - Back Door to Hell (1964) and Flight to Fury (1965). Those films are now only marginally harder to see than two intriguing, cryptic, sparse and beautiful Westerns they made together, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind (both 1966). Nicholson actually wrote the latter film, the clearest early sign of his ambition to be involved in the conception and creation of pictures. He has directed three times - the excellent Drive, He Said (1971), about a college basketball star dodging military service, Coin South (1978), the story of a reforming outlaw, The Two Jakes (1990) and - and while none were a commercial success, it is strange that with his level of commitment to projects he has been involved with he hasn't directed more.

Raving with Rafelson

Bob Rafelson was a fellow-spirit, scornful of the old Hollywood. He and Nicholson have now worked together five times and are as close as, say, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Leaud were. Rafelson was part inventor and owner of The Monkees, a pop group fashioned on the principle that any four kids with unkempt hair could be a rave for a year or so. With Nicholson as co-author, Rafelson made Head (1968), a surreal farce starring The Monkees, one of the best portraits of Sixties' lyrical anarchy. Thereafter, under Rafelson's direction, Nicholson did two diverse pieces of work that remain the best display of his acting versatility. In Five Easy Pieces (1970) he plays Bobby Dupea, a rough-neck oil-rigger who is actually a refugee from an earnest, musical family. The movie is a study of the thin line between liberty and irresponsibility, and it is a vital expression of Nicholson's equal interests in art and work and the life of outlaw sensuality.

Rafelson's The King of Marvin Gardens (1972) is a further exploration of the same theme. Nicholson and another old buddy, Bruce Dern, play the Staebler brothers. Nicholson depicts a lonely, introverted host on late-night radio: the artist as depressive, hoping to crystallize life's anguish, but despairing of his own-happiness. Brother Dern is another kind of artist, a relentlessly extrovert huckster who has crazy plans for a gambling kingdom in Hawaii. The balance of manic and depressive leads to a sharper tragedy than Five Easy Pieces offered, and The King of Marvin Gardens was too harsh for a big audience. It remains a masterpiece and the most deeply felt and self-effacing performance Nicholson has yet given.

However, those films were made in the wake of Easy Rider (1969) in which he had really made his mark. When Rip Torn refused to do the movie after a row with producer/star Peter Fonda and director/star Dennis Hopper, they cast Nicholson as the disillusioned young lawyer who tags along on the trip. It is probable that the enormous popularity of the movie owed much to Nicholson. He plays the sort of character a middle-class audience could identify with if it were to go along with the motorized vagrancy of the road.

Nicholson's new status allowed him to pick his parts more carefully in the Seventies. On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) is the only unaccountable choice: a result of his financial need and a studio's forlorn attempt to reach the young audience. Carnal Knowledge (1971) came from a wish to work with the director Mike Nichols, and it was a highly profitable movie that established the actor as a model for many American sexual drives and disorders.

Flying high

Also in the Seventies, Nicholson was the figurehead of two unerringly commercial movies. Chinatown (1974), in which a Los Angeles private eye sets out on a seemingly simple case, was not a great risk, but it showed how fully Nicholson was the heir to Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield - an actor flawed with the dismay of film noir, however robust he may seem. Chinatown also enabled him to stand as a helpless victim of love and paranoia: though set in the Thirties, the film is utterly modern in its politics. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) was a more daring project, and Nicholson was probably the most negotiable element in the film. His raffish charm as MacMurphy, imprisoned in an insane asylum for rape, made the madman appealing; his anger moved audiences all over the world. The film was a triumph, despite MacMurphy's death. Significantly, Nicholson dies or fails on screen more often than any other star.

Despite these commercial departures. Nicholson's urge to experiment was not exhausted. Henry Jaglom's A Safe Place (1971) is a very personal, poetic film that was only made because of Nicholson's wish to help an old friend. The Last Detail (1973), in which Nicholson plays a naval officer escorting a prisoner to jail, is more middle-of-the-road, but Professione: Reporter (1975, The Passenger) was proof of Nicholson's undiminished appetite for challenge. Its director, Michelangelo Antonioni, is notoriously aloof from his actors and the movie is patently esoteric, with all its emphasis on space, colour and identity. Yet Nicholson adapted very well to the fresh idiom grasping the fatalism of the reporter who has a brief reprieve from stagnation when he takes on the identity of a dead man. It took Marlon Brando in The Missouri Breaks (1976) to make Nicholson look overawed, despite his brave attempt to stand up to the aggressively brilliant and versatile star. However, he did contribute to this very underrated picaresque Western, and seemed to learn from it for his own Goin' South.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star

In 1980 he gave one of his most daring performances as Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. The film and his playing received a mixed reception, some accusing Nicholson of over-acting. Yet The Shining was a comedy, not a horror movie, and no-one understood its dainty commands of fantasy better than the actor. It remains the most bravura display of Nicholson's mastery of style and parody.

In the Eighties, Nicholson's persona moved in a slightly new direction, concentrating on romance - but always with a Nicholson twist. He starred opposite some of the most powerful women on the screen of the period - Jessica Lange (The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1981), Shirley Maclaine (Terms of Endearment, 1983 - for which he won his second Oscar), Kathleen Turner (Prizzi's Honor, 1985) and Meryl Streep (Heartburn, 1986). But his lovers were never straightforward and his romances never easy - there was always a twisted, almost psychotic, character waiting in the wings.

Prizzi's Honor, which cast him and Turner as two hit-men, trying to have an affair between assignments, made the ultimate comment on Nicholson as a romantic hero. Violence and murder are inextricably intertwined in the Nicholson persona with sex, or even love, and it is this tension that makes his films ultimately so challenging. The Witches of Eastwick (1987) once again combined evil and lust in a comedy about a genteel back-water of the United States with Nicholson happily going over-the-top this time as yet another deranged lover.

He then played a heartbreaking man on the skids in Ironweed (also 1987) which earned him another Oscar nomination. He rounded out 1987 with a very funny, deadpan cameo appearance as an imperious network anchorman in Broadcast News. By now something of an icon-as actor, movie star, and power broker-he accepted a whopping salary (and percentage which rumoured to total $60million) to play The Joker in Batman (1989), and chewed the scenery to his heart's content (and his fans'). In 1990 he realized a longtime ambition to make a sequel to Chinatown directing and starring in the aforementioned disappointing The Two Jakes.

After some time off, he appeared in three movies in succession in 1992: the dreadful comedy Man Trouble (which reunited him with director Bob Rafelson), the smash hit A Few Good Men (which gave him a plum, Oscar-nominated supporting role as a Machiavellian Marine officer), and the ambitious biography Hoffa (in which his galvanizing performance-in very convincing makeup-had to carry a diffuse and unsatisfying script). He then reteamed with director Mike Nichols to try something completely different-a werewolf movie, namely Wolf (1994). In 1994 he received the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award, reaffirming his unique status as a counterculture hero who has managed to function extraordinarily well in the movie mainstream. His next film was The Crossing Guard (1995).

His films from the mid 90s to 2003 were: Blood and Wine and Evening Star (both 1996), Mars Attacks! (also 1996 and bloody terrible!), As Good as It Gets (1997, for which Nicholson won yet another Oscar), The Pledge (2001), About Schmidt (2002), Anger Management and Something's Gotta Give (both 2003).

Nicholson had a 17 year relationship with actress Anjelica Huston which ended in 1990 after Rebecca Broussard was carrying his child. Apart from his daughter, Jennifer Nicholson (b. 1963) whose mother was Sandra Knight, Nicholson has three other children: Honey Hollman (b. 1981) with Danish supermodel, Winnie Hollman; Lorraine (b. 1990) and Raymond (b. 1992) with Rebecca Broussard.

His fingertips have been over the most beautiful women of the 20th century and past girlfriends include: Lara Flynn Boyle.