Eccentric Characters Fitting For Nicholson

Jack Nicholson gets away with just about anything: four-day work weeks, an obscene percentage of the first “Batman” movie’s profits, taking golf clubs to Mercedes-Benzes, fathering children at an advanced age and still living the single life in his art-filled Beverly Glen pad.

Of course, people just naturally want to give Jack his way. That’s simply what you do with someone who’s given you incalculable pleasure.

That rare movie star whose overabundance of charisma is matched by top-notch acting chops, fearless career choices and a filmography matched in quality only by Humphrey Bogart’s, the two-time Oscar winner is widely loved for a lot of good reasons.

Like the latest one: On his way to Kennedy International Airport last week to pick up his girlfriend Rebecca Broussard, Nicholson had his limo stop at a neighborhood liquor store in Jamaica, Queens, where he graciously shared a pint of Jim Beam with pursuing paparazzi and local strangers.

Gotta love him, right? But no matter how much one may appreciate Nicholson for his artistry and charm, it’s impossible not to view him apprehensively. The hair-trigger vindictiveness that makes his performances feel so dangerous and exciting has, we logically figure, to have a basis in some deep, dark reservoir of Nicholson’s soul.

Though cordial and forthcoming at 60, Nicholson is not about to do anything that will change that notion - which will be more prevalent than ever once people get a good look at Melvin Udall, his character in “As Good As It Gets,” arguably the actor’s most intolerable creation ever.

“My theory is that 85 percent of any character you play not only has things in common, but is exactly the same as you are,” Nicholson says in his signature, insinuating purr. “You have to isolate the other 15 percent, and that’s what you act. The rest, you just have to hope you’re relaxed enough to let it be honest.”

Even your most fearsome fantasies about the real Jack Nicholson probably don’t compare to the nightmare that is Melvin. A romance novelist with an obsessive-compulsive disorder, Melvin lives alone in a pricey Greenwich Village co-op. His neighbor is a gay artist, Simon Nye (Greg Kinnear); the film opens with Melvin tossing Simon’s little dog, a Brussels Griffon named Verdell, down a garbage chute.

This is one of Melvin’s kinder acts. A bottomless pit of racism, sexism, homophobia and general misanthropy, with a sharp tongue honed to slice anyone who comes near to ribbons, the closest thing Melvin has to a friend is the waitress at his favorite cafe. Carol Connelly (Helen Hunt of “Mad About You”) puts up with Melvin’s demanding ways and clean-freak eccentricities, mainly, because he’s nothing compared to her real problems. She lives in her mother’s apartment in Queens, where she’s trying to raise a very sickly son on her own.

Against everyone’s preference, not to mention their better judgment, Melvin, Carol, Simon and Verdell eventually find themselves helping one another out, bonding and even, strangely, experiencing love. Of course, none of these new relationships are remotely perfect.

How could they be? Melvin’s involved.

The romantic comedy was co-written and directed by James L. Brooks, who helmed “Terms of Endearment,” for which Nicholson won his Best Supporting Actor Oscar. This time around, Brooks has given the actor what many feel is his richest role in years. Nicholson already has won the National Board of Review’s Best Actor award, was runner-up in the Los Angeles Film Critics’ competition and has received a Golden Globe nomination for making Melvin happen.

Unlike much of Nicholson’s recent work, Melvin is neither hammily over the top (“Mars Attacks,” “A Few Good Men,” “Batman’s” Joker) nor indifferently imagined (“Man Trouble,” “The Two Jakes,” “Blood and Wine,” “Hoffa”). But even though he shares their outsider status, Melvin is also completely different from the tortured, more tough-hided anti-heroes of the actor’s classic period, roughly from “Easy Rider” (1969) through “Cuckoo’s Nest” and including his great work in “Five Easy Pieces,” “Carnal Knowledge,” “The Last Detail,” “Chinatown” and “The Passenger.”

“Melvin is more apparently vulnerable, oddly, than most roles I’ve played,” Nicholson allows. “He’s a character who chooses to improve himself, rather than circumstances driving him to do it. That’s very strong and unusual in comparison to other things that I’ve done.”

True. But was it a big acting job?

“I’m day-by-day vulnerable; to think otherwise would be a big misinterpretation of who I am,” Nicholson claims. “I have emotional problems getting home from the ballgame, you know? Is my daughter happy, things like that. I mean, I don’t know how anybody gets to where they’re not vulnerable, really.”

Nicholson admits turning 60 was traumatic. And it must be weird for the eternal bad boy to be at a point where people refer to his classic period. Yet Nicholson, typically, is not approaching old age wearing vulnerability on his sleeve.

“I think that as you get older, the range of things you can try to illustrate or emanate broadens,” he says with a pleased grin. “I’m excited - I have been for five or 10 years - because it’s that one area of the movies that hasn’t been re-honed since the 1940s.

“You know, everywhere I go, people are shocked by my actual age,” says Nicholson, his barrel chest more prominent and expressive eyebrows wirier with each passing year. “And I’m not, as you all know, a health fiend.

“I do my professional job to get lookin’ right for a movie, but I also don’t resist a lot of things that other people resist that are vitalizing.

“A friend of mine coined our age group the New Old, and I think he’s right. I mean, I remember people in their 60s when I was in my 20s, and they didn’t look like us.”

Robust as he still may be, Nicholson is exhibiting signs of age. One of his proudest achievements on “As Good as it Gets,” he says, was working the production only four days a week. And he’s coy when asked if he’s thought about retirement.

“No, but I might just stop working,” he says. “Look, I don’t have to do anything. I’ve achieved any goals I set for myself and beyond.

“I had a few joke goals, but nobody can set the goal to do what I have been fortunate enough to have done in, around and to me.”

The likelihood of Nicholson ever bowing out of movies is slim. When he talks about Hollywood’s effect on his life, it’s filtered through his standard, jaundiced wit. But it’s also clear that, regardless of any darkness that haunts his soul, movies have always supplied the light.

“Let’s give the dreaded Hollywood its due. I don’t want to be anywhere else but here. I like the people, I’m not against Hollywood in any form whatsoever. After all, it can’t beat me.”