The Chinatown parallel is worth addressing directly because it appears in many retellings and creates a false impression. Chinatown, released June 20, 1974, contains in its plot a revelation involving incest and concealed parentage — a woman who is both the mother and sister of a young girl, the result of rape by her father. This plot element, written by Robert Towne, is entirely fictional. The film’s filming had wrapped before the Time investigation produced its revelation about Nicholson’s family. The thematic overlap between the film’s plot and the facts of Nicholson’s life is a coincidence of timing, not evidence of a meaningful parallel. Treating Chinatown’s fictional incest plot as though it illuminates or mirrors Nicholson’s actual family situation would be a misreading of both the film and the biography.
The chronology error matters for another reason: some retellings of the story imply or state that the revelation came before Nicholson made Chinatown, as though his knowledge of his family secret somehow informed his performance in the film. The filming of Chinatown wrapped in early 1974; the Time investigation appears to have produced its revelation around the time of the film’s release in June 1974 or in the preparation of the profile associated with it. Nicholson did not know about his family’s secret when he was filming Chinatown. The parallel is one of timing, not causation.
Another common distortion involves the precise age at which Nicholson learned the truth. The headline — and the consistent statement across most reliable accounts — is that he was thirty-seven. Some secondary accounts have garbled this into other ages, including a notably incorrect claim that he was sixty when he learned the truth (which appears to have been an error in a biographical summary). He was born in April 1937. If the revelation came in mid-1974, he was thirty-seven. That is consistent with the available chronology.