Ranking The 30 Best Actors of All-Time

5. Jack Nicholson

Image Source: Gazette Review

One of the few actors to exemplify the counterculture, Jack Nicholson is the Gable, the Bogart, and the Cagney of his times. His illustrious career has been spent playing brooding rebels, crazed villains and sneering charmers on the big screen. Totally unflinching in his choice of material, Nicholson’s body of work has earned him a dozen Academy Award nominations (a record for a male actor). The three-time Oscar winner redefined what a leading man could be in the 1970’s and ’80s in films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Last Detail, and The Shining. Additionally, Nicholson walloped us over the head decades later with arguably his best work to date in Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt. One of cinema’s truly iconic actors of the past fifty years, its impossible to not like — or fall in love with Jack Nicholson.