Jack Nicholson screen characters, someone who is "snarly, dumb, smart, noble, rascally—all the parts of 'Jack'" Nicholson went on to win his next Academy Award for Best Actor in the romantic comedy, "As Good as It Gets" (1997), his third film directed by James L. Brooks. He played Melvin Udall, a "wickedly funny", mean-spirited, obsessive-compulsive novelist. "I'm a studio Method actor", he said. "So I was prone to give some kind of clinical presentation of the disorder." His Oscar was matched with the Academy Award for Best Actress for Helen Hunt, who played a Manhattan wisecracking, single-mother waitress drawn into a love/hate
Jack Nicholson but it wasn't what I'd call traumatizing ... I was pretty well psychologically formed". Nicholson grew up in Neptune City, New Jersey. He was raised in his mother's Roman Catholic religion. Before starting high school, his family moved to an apartment in Spring Lake, New Jersey. "When Jack was ready for high school, the family moved once more—this time two miles (three kilometres) farther south to old-money Spring Lake, New Jersey's so-called Irish Riviera, where Ethel May set up her beauty parlor in a rambling duplex at 505 Mercer Avenue." "Nick", as he was known to his high school friends,