Academy Award for Best Actor

1975

Jack Nicholson 

As

Randle Patrick "Mac" McMurphy

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

John Joseph "Jack" Nicholson (born April 22, 1937) is an American actor and filmmaker. Throughout his career, Nicholson has portrayed unique and challenging roles, many of which include dark portrayals of excitable, neurotic and psychopathic characters. Nicholson's 12 Academy Award nominations make him the most nominated male actor in the Academy's history.

Nicholson has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice, one for the drama One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and the other for the romantic comedy As Good as It Gets (1997). He also won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the comedy-drama Terms of Endearment (1983). Nicholson is tied with Walter Brennan and Sir Daniel Day-Lewis as one of three male actors to win three Academy Awards. In 1988 Nicholson won a Grammy Award for Best Album for Children for The Elephant's Child. He is well known for playing Frank Costello in the Martin Scorsese-directed crime drama The Departed (2006), Jack Torrance in the Stanley Kubrick–directed psychological horror film The Shining (1980) and the Joker in Batman (1989).

Nicholson is one of only two actors to be nominated for an Academy Award for acting in every decade from the 1960s to the 2000s; the other was Michael Caine. 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. Other notable films in which he has starred include the road movie Easy Rider (1969), the drama Five Easy Pieces (1970), the comedy-drama film The Last Detail (1973), the neo-noir mystery film Chinatown (1974), the drama The Passenger (1975), the epic film Reds (1981), the romantic horror film Wolf (1994), the legal drama A Few Good Men (1992), the Sean Penn-directed mystery film The Pledge (2001), and the comedy-drama About Schmidt (2002).