Jack Nicholson

Perhaps no other actor of his generation made more of a lasting impression than Jack Nicholson. Over the course of several decades, Nicholson delivered one sterling performance after another in films that have long been considered as being some of the greatest ever made. Though he got his start with low-budget king Roger Corman in the late-1950s, the actor eventually made his mark with a memorable supporting role in the iconic counterculture road film, "Easy Rider" (1969). Thanks to that Oscar-nominated performance, Nicholson embarked on a fruitful decade of work that ultimately cemented his place in cinematic history, starting with a shaded portrayal of a man searching for what went wrong with his life in "Five Easy Pieces" (1970).

But it was his performance as the dogged private detective Jake Gittes in "Chinatown" (1974) that turned the already successful actor into a legend, which he followed with perhaps his most enduring film, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975). He gave an iconic performance in "The Shining" (1980), and was also strong in such films as "The Witches of Eastwick" (1987) and "Batman" (1990), as well as in "Terms of Endearment" (1983) and "As Good As It Gets" (1997), all of which underscored Nicholson's place in at the top of the Hollywood pantheon.