Like many of his contemporaries who have made film careers out of playing leading men to women young enough to be their . . . well, not their daughters, but maybe the intern caretaker at their nursing home, Jack Nicholson doesn't mind an on-screen dalliance with a very young lady. Why should he? Nobody tells Michael Douglas that his saggy posterior just doesn't look correct on film next to that of a 25-year-old ingenue. (At least not to his face they don't.) Nobody says, "Hey Warren (cough) 'Bulworth' (cough) Beatty — did Halle Berry have to carry an oxygen tank for you when you had scenes together?"

Jack Nicholson seems to get away with huge age disparities in his movies because the films he stars in tend to acknowledge his age (especially his most recent films, "About Schmidt" and "Something's Gotta Give"), chalking up his affection for young ladies to that common movie star affliction, Dirty Old Man Syndrome.

In "Something's Gotta Give," in fact, the conventional wisdom about Jack and young co-stars is turned on its head when Jack (he may be playing a character in the movie, but he's always "Jack") falls for Diane Keaton, a woman who's at least within a decade of his age.

So what does he do when he sees her naked? He flips out because he's never seen a woman that old in the buff.

Good old Jack.


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