NAKED LUNCH
Jack Nicholson and Kathy Bates Expose the Beauty of Schmidt
BY REBECCA COHEN

In a city that places great importance on youth and physical beauty, Jack Nicholson and Kathy Bates refuse to give into Hollywood pressures. In their recent film collaboration, About Schmidt, Nicholson and Bates let it all hang out–literally. Nicholson plays Warren Schmidt, a man devoid of all vanity. In fact, Schmidt seems almost proud of the hair that has begun sprouting from his ears while paying no mind to the strands that have ceased growing on his head.

And just like Schmidt, Nicholson sees no shame in growing older gracefully and naturally. "I’m an actor who they said was wrinkled and balding and everything else when I was still in my early thirties," he says. "Most of the people who wrote that, who thought they were younger than me, are now bald and wrinkled. As you can see, I don’t have any plugs or tucks or this or that. People can do it if they want. I look at it as mutilation."

"Age is the first limitation on roles that I’ve ever had to encounter and I did that awhile ago," he adds. "People play lizards, blobs, walls. If you can’t play 45 when you’re 40, what are we really talking about?"

Nicholson has never been one to cave. Even as a young child he knew how to get what he wanted. He remembers sawing the leg off of the dining room table as a young child and then refusing "to cop. I remember the moment. I was under there with a saw and I don’t know why. I was sawing away and I don’t know what I was doing. [My parents] went all the way down the line with me…I’m one of the kids who actually got coal for Christmas one year."

"But then I cried so hard, they didn’t last very long. They went into the closet and got the little sled and the baseball bat. I had my way in the end," adds Nicholson.

Such determination and conviction has been the core of Nicholson's craft for the past forty years. With unparalleled talent and charisma, his work speaks for itself.

And so does the work of Academy Award winner Kathy Bates who, with almost no make-up, graying, unruly hair and a nude scene that will take your breath away, is one of the few actresses who doesn’t let vanity dull her skill–and this is evident in Schmidt.

The Los Angeles resident sees first-hand the pressure to remain young and beautiful but, like Nicholson, refuses to succumb. In one particularly telling scene Bates, who plays the free-spirited hippie Roberta, completely disrobes before joining Schmidt in the hot tub.

"I felt comfortable," Bates says, although she admits to having had a little help beforehand. "I went to the hard stuff," she reveals, chuckling. "I had a cosmopolitan. We didn’t fool around. But just one… I had too many lines. It was fun actually… hot tub, Jack Nicholson. He was great. After we did the first part of the scene and I was getting out and getting my robe on he shook my hand and said, ‘Beautiful work, honey.’ That was great."

"When you do a movie that’s not pandering to what you imagine people want to see at this given moment in their life, that’s the real chance you take," says Nicholson. "From my side of the dial, you start thinking, 'well, is subtlety and humanity suddenly a bad word in the movie business?' I don’t know. No one’s blowing up or ramming their car into the supermarket. I’ll do that movie next, probably," he says with a laugh.

The Oscar-winner sums it all up thusly: "This movie is about humanity. This is a human movie, human problems, human aspirations, human frailties. If I wasn’t in it myself, I would say it’s quite beautiful."