29 Years Ago In Time

At the Academy Awards on March 23, JACK NICHOLSON will be up for his fourth Oscar. Three decades ago, he was just hitting his stride as an exemplar of the new Hollywood star:

In Easy Rider (1969) and in the freer, more personal films that flowed from its success, Nicholson became a kind of figurehead for a loose group of actors and filmmakers who were trying to expand the commercial genre...Their work was almost always full of aggressive invention, but the new Hollywood passed, the victim of erratic returns at the box office. Nicholson passed along with it, not out of sight, but on to other things. He worked into the mainstream, and started running with the high rollers. He now counts as two of his buddies Paramount Production Chief Robert Evans and Warren Beatty, his co-star in Fortune. Nicholson, along with his real gifts, has always had a canny ability to move with the heat. He has done it so well that now he is the heat. He knew he had it knocked after he saw a rough cut of Chinatown. "Mogul," he said to Evans, "we got that hot one. Get those checks ready--we're on our way." -TIME, Aug. 12, 1974