Five Easy Pieces followed in 1970, and it deepened the perception of his range. He played Bobby Dupea, a man who had rejected a background of classical musical training to work on an oil rig, who carried his alienation from his own history and his own potential with a specific kind of coiled bitterness. The role required Nicholson to play someone who had walked away from who he was supposed to be — not a trivial irony, given what he did not yet know about his own origins. He received his first Best Actor nomination for Five Easy Pieces.
Through The Last Detail, Chinatown, and eventually One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — which won him the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1975 — Nicholson was building one of the most significant careers in American cinema at the same time that a background researcher at Time magazine was beginning to investigate what the early chapters of that life actually looked like.
The gap between the public biography and the private reality was never visible from the public side. The public biography was coherent: New Jersey working-class kid moves west, struggles for a decade, breaks through, becomes a star. The private reality had an additional layer that no one on the public side knew about. The child on the New Jersey shore had a biological mother he thought was his sister, a biological grandmother he thought was his mother, and an absent biological father whose identity was genuinely uncertain.
None of that was visible in any interview or profile. The family arrangement that had been made in 1937 was still holding in 1974. It held right up to the phone call.