He may have been celebrated as much for his hell-raising as his acting, but Jack Nicholson tells Steve Pratt why he finally decided to act his age - well almost.

HE'S wearing dark glasses but Jack Nicholson isn't using them to hide the bleary-eyed results of a night on the town. The Hollywood actor whose womanising and party animal antics have been well-chronicled over the years is more of a stay-at-home type nowadays.

Perhaps he's not quite ready to settle down in his armchair with a cup of cocoa to watch the telly. Yet, come Academy Awards time at the end of this month, the actor who's received more Oscar nominations than any other won't be partying the night away but watching the ceremony on the TV at his Mulholland Drive home.

He'll be cheering on Diane Keaton, an Oscar hopeful as best actress for her performance opposite Nicholson in the romantic comedy Something's Gotta Give.

That film's the reason for his presence in London. Plans to catch up with old friends at the same time hit a snag. "All my pals seem to be out of town, although I did have dinner with David Bailey last night," he says, holding court in a London hotel the afternoon after the night before.

"I'm only here for a couple of days, so I won't be able to Jack-the-lad it up very much on this trip. I'm not much of a raver any more. It's unattractive and inappropriate."

At 66, he's acting his age - well almost, he plays a 63-year-old - in Something's Gotta Give, as a bachelor who only dates women under 30. A heart attack leaves him recovering at the beach home of his latest girlfriend's divorced mother (Keaton). Slowly but surely the pair become attracted to each other.

His character is told that if he can climb the stairs from the beach to the house without getting out of breath, then he's fit enough after his heart attack to have sex again. "I've been walking pretty slowly upstairs for a while," admits Nicholson while delivering a trademark devilish grin.

PLAYING an ill man gave him cause to contemplate his own mortality. "When you have a movie that has a heart attack or accident, there's something superstitious about actors. Every time I had heartburn, I thought it was all over," he says.

The film has been a big hit in US cinemas and, as a result, he anticipates being offered "a lot of old roues" in the next year or so. He won't take them for fear of being pigeonholed, which is "death to all actors".

Some might accuse him of offering variations on his devilish ladies' man persona on screen over the years. A glance down his credits show a greater versatility than perhaps most people care to remember, thanks to his off-screen Jack-the-lad image becoming confused with his screen roles.

Something's Gotta Give offers him the chance to be romantic in a comedy, which he reckons is new for him. When romance has happened before on screen, he's been a monster or crazy, so a straightforward romantic comedy is a first for him. Certainly he and Keaton, whom he's known for years but only worked with briefly in Reds, have good chemistry as the "oldies" finding romance with each other.

He was also working for a female director - Nancy Meyers, who also wrote the script - for the first time on a movie. She is a very forceful director, he says, which she has in common with most of the directors with whom he's worked.

"They like to torch up a little more," he says. "She's written the material and this is a movie that works from the script, and she just makes you do the script. I didn't find it that different from working with a male director, apart from I couldn't push her around."

The womanising character seems to have echoes of Nicholson himself, which he says is inevitable. "With most characters 85 per cent are synonymous no matter who you are playing," says the actor.

"Nancy wrote the script for me. I talked to her in advance while she was writing, and I guess it's some good piece of what my life has been like."

What emerges is how proud he is of the movie, pointing out that in the US it went up against all the blockbusters at Christmas and beat them.

As befits his image, he has a beautiful girl by his side during the interview - actress Amanda Peet, who plays Keaton's daughter in the film. What she noticed about Nicholson while working with him was that he's still in love with acting.

He got into acting to meet girls (and definitely succeeded on that count) but "liked it immediately and still like it". He could take the money and run, but doesn't. He cares about what audiences think, reporting that 97 per cent of the exit polls on Something's Gotta Give were favourable.

HIS own attitude changed after the September 11 tragedy. "The way it affected me is that I said I don't have too much to say about this type of thing," he explains.

"I want to do comedy. I don't want to depress people or challenge their morality, things I've done at other times in my life. I'm going to learn about comedy and go over there with the clowns where I belong. You get good scripts or opportunities and that's what dictates what you do."

As for the state of Hollywood, he thinks you have to be optimistic. Most of the problems are to do with distribution. "In the Sixties and Seventies because of the distribution of foreign films, we expected to see masterpieces every year. It was a wonderful time to get a film education," he says.

"A studio head has three or four movies a year he wants to make, and then has to fill out the schedule with the rest. Relationships mean nothing. You can't make your relative a movie star, or an audience like a movie they don't like."

His own efforts as a director - with The Two Jakes, Goin' South and Drive, He Said - were not crowd-pullers. A return behind the camera isn't imminent, because of time constraints and lack of scripts that attract him.

"I act all the time so I don't have that much time to direct. None of the movies which I directed were particularly successful, although I loved them all. I worked every day for three years up to this picture. I deserve a long rest," he says.

Even if he's not around, others continue to make a living out of being Jack Nicholson impersonators. "I guess some people are good at it," he says, before adding impishly: "I always feel I'm inimitable."

* Something's Gotta Give (12A) is showing now in cinemas.

Published: 07/02/2004