Title: DIANE KEATON; JACK NICHOLSON; FAVORITE SCREEN COUPLE

Date: 4/1/2004; Publication: Irish America; Author: Anonymous

Irish America

04-01-2004

DIANE KEATON; JACK NICHOLSON; FAVORITE SCREEN COUPLE

Byline: Anonymous
Volume: XX
Number: 2
ISSN: 08844240
Publication Date: 04-01-2004
Page: 36
Type: Periodical
Language: English

Just before the smash Jack Nicholson-Diane Keaton film Something's Gotta Give hit the big screen in 2003, there was a bit of grumbling. Not a few people wondered if moviegoers would pay to see an unabashedly middle-aged romantic comedy.

Roughly $100 million later, the skeptics were proven wrong. The film, written and directed by Nancy Meyers (What Women Want, The Parent Trap), clearly tapped into a movie audience craving non-juvenile entertainment. Critics loudly applauded the on screen chemistry between Hollywood icons Keaton and Nicholson.

To what does Keaton attribute this chemistry?

"I'm Irish and Jack's Irish," she said in a recent interview. "I think we like to laugh at the other person when they fall, really lame stuff. Just humiliating each other was a lot of fun for the both of us."

In Something's Gotta Give, the 66-year-old Nicholson plays Harry Sanborn, a record company executive who dates much younger women. During a weekend with his latest girlfriend (Amanda Peet), Harry is introduced to the girl's mother, a divorced playwright named Erica (Keaton). Go figure, the duo hit it off when they are forced to spend time together in a small beach house.

Complications arise, however. In a neat twist, Erica finds herself pursued by a younger man who also happens to be Harry's doctor (Keanu Reeves).

The success of Something's Gotta Give shows that both Nicholson and Keaton, 57, still have a magic Hollywood touch.

Keaton was born Diane Hall in L.A. in 1946. She studied acting at Manhattan's Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater, and rose to fame as Michael Corleone's wife in The Godfather (1972). Keaton reached yet another level of stardom five years later, starring opposite Woody Allen in his acclaimed comedy Annie Hall. Keaton won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of a neurotic New Yorker in love with the equally neurotic Allen.

Keaton subsequently starred in the controversial Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Reds (with Nicholson, who played Eugene O'Neill), Little Drummer Girl, Baby Boom and First Wives Club.

Nicholson was born in Neptune, New Jersey in 1937. He was raised by his mother and grandmother. He traveled to California at the age of 17, but planned to return to the East Coast to attend college. He landed a job as an office boy in MGM's animation department, however, and the rest is Hollywood history.

Nicholson's breakthrough role was the Dennis Hopper/Peter Fonda counterculture classic Easy Rider from 1969. Nicholson earned an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor, kicking off a decades-long string of nominations for diverse roles in classics such as Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ironweed, The Shining and more recently Batman, A Few Good Men, About Schmidt and Anger Management. He ultimately won three Oscars.

Nicholson has several children with various women, including a son, Raymond, with Rebecca Broussard. This brought an end to Nicholson's long, much publicized relationship with fellow Irish American Anjelica Huston.

Nicholson's personal life has never been stable. When he was in his late 30s, he learned that the woman he thought was his older sister was in fact his mother, and the woman he thought was his mother was actually his grandmother.

Article copyright Irish America Inc.

Photograph (Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton)

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