Jack Nicholson, Academy Award winning actor who is "positively against" abortion. (AP)
(CNSNews.com) -- Hollywood legend Jack Nicholson, 76, who is retiring from movies it was reported today, is, unlike many liberals in Tinseltown, a staunch pro-lifer who said in a 1984 interview about abortion, “I’m positively against it. I don’t have the right to any other view."
He added that it was the moral character of his mother and grandmother that ensured he himself had not been aborted.
The Academy Award-winning Nicholson was born on Apr. 22, 1937 to a woman named June Frances Nicholson, who was 17 years old at the time and a showgirl dancer. Jack was raised by his maternal grandparents, John Nicholson and Ethel May, believing they were his real parents and that June Frances was his sister. Jack Nicholson did not find out until 1974, after his mother had died of cancer, that June Frances was his real mother.
In the 1984 Rolling Stone interview, Jack Nicholson described his mother and the life she had lived and also talked about abortion. He said, “I’m very contra my constituency in terms of abortion because I’m positively against it. I don’t have the right to any other view.”
June Frances Nicholson, mother of actor Jack Nicholson.
“My only emotion is gratitude, literally, for my life,” said Nicholson. “[If June and Ethel had been] of less character, I never would have gotten to live. These women gave me the gift of life.”
“It’s a feminist narrative in the very pure form,” said Nicholson. “They trained me great, those ladies. I still, to this day, have never borrowed a nickel from anybody and never felt like I couldn’t take care of myself. They made the imperative of my self-sufficiency obvious.”
Nicholson disclosed that he never learned who his father was because the only people who really knew were his mother, June Frances, and his grandmother, Ethel May, and they had died before he even learned, in 1974, the true identity of his mother. “[T]hey never told anybody,” said Nicholson.
June Frances had married showman Donald Furcillo (in October 1936) six months prior to the birth of her son, John Joseph “Jack” Nicholson. But Furcillo was already married and, also partly because of Furcillo’s reported drinking, the marriage to June Frances did not work out.
Academy Award-winning actor Jack Nicholson. (AP)
In further describing his mother in the interview, Nicholson said, “June and I had so much in common. We both fight hard. It didn’t do her any good not to tell me, but she didn’t because you never know how I would’ve reacted when I was younger. I got a job in Mexico when June was dying. First time with a studio, a lot of weeks. Sandra [Jack’s wife 1962-68] was pregnant with Jennifer [Jack’s daughter], and June was in a terminal state. She looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Shall I wait?’ In other words, ‘Shall I try and fight this through?’ And I said no.”
Nicholson was raised a Roman Catholic, the religion of his mother, and grew up in Neptune City, New Jersey. He has won three Academy Awards, including best actor for his role in the 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and the 1997 film “As Good as It Gets.”
RadarOnline.com reported on Sept. 4 that Jack Nicholson was retiring from the movie business apparently, at age 76, because of memory loss problems. Nicholson has starred in at least 65 films since 1958.