John Joseph Nicholson (born April 22, 1937) is an American retired actor and filmmaker whose career spanned more than 50 years. He is known for having played a wide range of starring and supporting roles, including comic characters, romantic leads, anti-heroes and villains. In many of his films, he played the "eternal outsider, the sardonic drifter", someone who rebels against the social structure. For several decades, Nicholson has been a spectator at basketball games featuring the Los Angeles Lakers.
His most known and celebrated films include the road drama Easy Rider (1969), the drama One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975); the comedy-dramas Terms of Endearment (1983), As Good as It Gets (1997), and About Schmidt (2002); the neo-noir mystery Chinatown (1974), the horror film The Shining (1980), the superhero film Batman (1989), the legal drama A Few Good Men (1992), the comedy Anger Management (2003), the romantic comedy Something's Gotta Give (2003), and the crime drama The Departed (2006). He has also directed three films, including The Two Jakes (1990), a sequel to Chinatown.
His twelve Academy Award nominations make him the most nominated male actor in the Academy's history. He has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice, once for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and once for As Good as It Gets (1997); he also won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Terms of Endearment (1983). He is one of only three male actors to win three Academy Awards, and one of only two actors to be nominated for an Academy Award for acting in every decade from the 1960s to the 2000s. He has won six Golden Globe Awards and received the Kennedy Center Honor in 2001. In 1994, he became one of the youngest actors to be awarded the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award.